Scientists Turn to Technology for Options Amid Rifts Over Use of Forests : Resources: Pagers and navigation equipment help provide data to mediate among environmentalists, hunters, ranchers and loggers.

Navigation gear used by the Navy on the high seas and pagers used by doctors on the golf course are helping thS. Forest Service understand the ways of deer, elk, cattle and even hunters.

The project on the Starkey Experimental Forest and Range in northeastern Oregon’s Blue Mountains represents an investment of $6 million over 10 years. But the Forest Service figures it is money well spent as a range war heats up involving environmentalists, ranchers, hunters and loggers.

“If you think research is expensive, try the cost of ignorance. The farther you get out in front on research, the more options you have on a solution,” said Jack Ward Thomas, who sold the Forest Service on the project.

Thomas, chief wildlife research biologist at the agency’s Pacific Northwest Research Station in La Grande, knows all about coming late to a crisis without many options. He was head of a team of government scientists that reluctantly recommended putting huge tracts of old-growth forests in the Northwest off limits to logging. The plan hopes to save the northern spotted owl from extinction, but it will cost thousands of jobs.

Protected by the Endangered Species Act, the spotted owl has forced Congress to start listening to scientists, rather than the timber industry, to decide the fate of the region’s remaining ancient forests. When scientists start calling the shots in the battle over range lands, they want to be ready with high-powered research.

“The bottom line is people expect more and more products out of the national forests,” said Mike Wisdom, a wildlife biologist at the Pacific Northwest Research Station. “We are going to have to make some hard choices on what products we are going to feature and what we are not going to deliver on to all those user groups.”

Environmentalists want cattle off the public lands, contending that overgrazing has ruined rivers and destroyed grasslands. Hunters want larger elk and deer herds. Ranchers want their cattle to summer on the range, where grazing is cheaper than private pastures. And loggers want to keep harvesting timber at a time when pressure is increasing to cut fewer trees.

Hoping to find answers for everyone, the Forest Service and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife have tried some novel approaches at Starkey, in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest.

In 1987, the Forest Service spent $585,000 to put an eight-foot “trampoline” fence developed by New Zealand red deer ranchers around 40 square miles of woods and meadows. It is designed to bounce when elk and deer run into it, so the animals won’t get hurt.

The agencies installed a $1.3-million automated Loran navigation system that can pinpoint radio-collared elk, deer and cattle. A signal to an ordinary pager in the radio collar turns on the Loran receiver, which calculates its position from Loran towers hundreds of miles away. That information is relayed by microwave link to the base station, where it is recorded.

The scientists program into a computer which of the 60 elk, 60 cattle and 60 deer wearing collars they want to locate among the 400 elk, 250 deer and 600 cow-calf pairs inside the fence. The system can spot one animal every 15 seconds, day or night, rain or shine.

“When we proposed this research back in the mid-’80s, we wanted to do something that would provide very powerful information beyond the conventional kinds of traditional studies we’ve done in the past,” Wisdom said. “We really wanted to measure animal response to changes in habitat or human activities in a very accurate and frequent manner, as animals moved about each day and each season.”

At the knotty-pine paneled module that serves as the base station, animal scientist Cheryl Borum calls up on her computer screen a replay of last fall’s elk hunt. Hunters carrying backpack radio transmitters show up as red dots, and elk with radio collars are black dots. They are superimposed on a detailed map of the landscape.

“You can see one hunter has moved in here and goosed (the elk) down a little farther to the corner of the fence,” said Borum, tracking the dots with her finger as they moved across the screen.

In the past, when biologists wanted to see how deer and elk would react to logging or road building, the animals would just go somewhere else, Thomas said.

The tracking system is providing unprecedented amounts of data with accuracy never before achieved.

“Whereas studies in the past generated perhaps a few thousand locations, with very intensive amounts of time put in by biologists running around with hand-held antennas, this system we think will generate at least 4 million valid locations of cattle, deer and elk over the 10 years of the study,” Wisdom said. “We can simply come in and grab the magnetic tape and go back to the lab and do our analysis.”

The cost amounts to a little more than $1 a location, compared to as much as $75 in the past.

The old radio-tracking techniques could spot an animal within a half-mile of its location. That’s not good enough, when 80 kinds of habitat have been mapped out by satellite and a stand of trees might be only 200 yards wide. The Loran system is accurate to within 10 yards.

Other projects are trying to learn how pileated woodpeckers, which need standing dead trees for feeding and nesting, react to intensive logging, and whether elk need dense forest cover as shelter against winter cold.

Traditionally, range managers have figured that one cow-calf pair eats as much as 2.5 elk or six deer. That has meant telling ranchers they can’t graze their cattle on lands where deer and elk are a priority, despite evidence they often eat different things.

“Part of the Starkey research seeks to identify under what range conditions does it appear deer, elk and cattle are in competition for the same forage at the same time and place, and also under what conditions they distribute in a manner than minimizes competition,” Wisdom said.

Richard Page of Mt. Vernon, president of the Grant County Stockgrowers, is a cattle rancher who depends on public lands to graze his livestock during the summer. He is skeptical that scientific evidence will protect his way of life if public opinion swings too strongly in favor of environmentalists who want to drive cattle off the range.

“I don’t think anything will change their mind until you take the food off their table and the shoes off their feet,” Page said. “I would be absolutely devastated without a forest (grazing) permit. I would either have to go out and buy half a million dollars’ worth of private ground or quit cattle ranching altogether.”