The Chinese word for crisis, 危机, isn’t a combination of the symbols for “danger” and “opportunity” as some business strategy books once claimed. But if it did, it could be the logo for the 15th annual North American Forest Ecology Workshop.
Last month, almost 500 scientists, government officials, NGO representatives, students and tech gear vendors gathered in Missoula for four days of workshops, presentations and networking about wildland management. Or, as Washington Department of Natural Resources Forest Health Scientist Derek Churchill put it: “nerd camp.”
Like most summer camps, the mood on the third floor of the University of Montana University Center from June 23-26 was upbeat as old colleagues reunited and new friends tried to maximize attendance across 50 concurrent sessions, each featuring at least three experts displaying their latest work. At the same time, no one could escape the background hum of federal agency disruption, funding and staffing cuts, and a looming Super El Niño fire season.
“We went through the first six months of reign of terror, followed by the reign of chaos,” Churchill said of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency firings and resignations in early 2025, and the subsequent restructuring of U.S. Forest Service and Interior land-management leadership. “We just keep doing the work. A lot of research grants have been going dark, but we’ve still got legacy funding from others. There’s lots of new problems to solve. Forest ecosystems are very dynamic, and we love disturbance. We love studying how they change and adapt.”
Last year, in what some called the “Valentines’ Day Massacre,” the Elon Musk-led DOGE eliminated 3,400 Forest Service jobs. In July, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced the elimination of the Forest Service’s regional headquarters framework. Volunteers and nonprofit groups rallied to clear trails and clean campgrounds as seasonal jobs went unfilled. The Trump administration’s 2027 budget proposal zeros out research funding for next year, although Congress ignored a similar request for this fiscal year and is likely to do so again. On June 18, a National Science Foundation memo stated that its biological sciences grants were cut by $200 million, and its math and physical sciences grant programs had to “pull back” existing awards to absorb a $260 million budget reduction before the end of the fiscal year on September 30.
“It’s pretty daunting thinking about getting a science career off the ground right now. Funding sources are so unstable. There’s a lot of political uncertainty.”
Zoe Wall, Ph.D candidate, University of Nevada-Las Vegas
At the same time, Trump executive orders called for increased timber harvesting, a restructuring of wildland firefighting, rollbacks of Endangered Species Act protections, and other big changes to public lands management. Some of those are works in progress, while others have mutated as they’ve gone through public review.
In mid-June, for instance, Forest Service Chief Tom Shultz told the Missoulian newspaper that the Region 1 headquarters and scientific offices would remain in Missoula as a new operations service center. However, he added that research stations in Bozeman and Hungry Horse were still being evaluated for possible closure. A new Forest Service state director office will be opened soon in the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest supervisor’s office in Helena.
While that turmoil rattled like a creaky ventilator in the ceiling, it didn’t much affect the business on the floor. As University of Montana Wilderness Institute Director Andrew Larson put it, “There’s lots of work to be done.”
One university ballroom was given over to vendors and student research poster presentations. A company called East-30 displayed sensors that measure moisture and sap flow in living or dead trees — vital data for wildland firefighters predicting how easily a forest patch might ignite. Titley Scientific’s table had boxes that looked like trail cameras, but contained acoustic sensors that measured wildlife activity by sound.
Rows of student research posters filled the middle of the ballroom. The 67 projects pursued questions like, “Can prescribed fire reduce PM2.5 emissions?” (conclusion: early claims of net reductions in extremely small smoke particles are likely overstated). Getting a poster accepted for display at the conference is a major stepping stone on a master’s or doctoral student’s career path. The next step is an in-person presentation in one of the session rooms, and eventually a keynote address before the whole assembly.
“We want to know why things are happening,” said Ceci Conroy, a doctoral student at UM. “But before you get there, you have to have all the nitty-gritty systems in place. You’re building the engine of the car.”
For example, fellow UM student Kevin Young presented his work on “forest carbon damages due to wildfire,” in other words how to measure how much climate-changing carbon gets released when a forest burns down. Worldwide, forests store about 2.4 petagrams (2.4 billion metric tons) of carbon in their wood every year. To grind that down to the individual fire incident scale, Young took the TreeMap2020 database, which shows how many trees stand in every 30-meter polygon of the continental United States, and ran it through the Large Fire Simulator, which predicts how a given landscape might burn in various historic weather and terrain conditions over thousands of modeling runs.
This produced a formula, an equation Young could use to show how much carbon gets released in a particular pyrome (the unit of geography wildfire scientists use like counties, only with specific burning characteristics). It showed a major wildfire in Pyrome 10, covering the Missoula and Mission valleys of western Montana, might release 37 million metric tons of carbon.
What does that number even mean? This is where the raw science of researchers becomes the policy points of decision-makers. For comparison, U.S. cars and trucks release about 1.6 billion metric tons of carbon a year, or about two-thirds as much as the entire planet’s unburned forests are sequestering annually. The coal-fired electricity generators at Montana’s Colstrip facility emit about 10.8 million metric tons of carbon a year.
U.S. cars and trucks release about 1.6 billion metric tons of carbon a year, or about two-thirds as much as the entire planet’s unburned forests are sequestering annually.
The people seat-hopping from workshop to workshop at the conference are the ones politicians, agency heads and journalists will call when they want to explain how a new federal mandate might work or fail. They also try to translate the mindsets of research and policy: One presentation on post-wildfire juniper recovery observed that the results depend on whether one sees the forest as a fuel supply or an ecosystem.
At least 70 of those attendees were students, coming from as close as Missoula to as far as Pakistan. Zoe Wall, a Ph.D candidate at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, said she came to get her work in front of fellow researchers and potential employers.
“It’s pretty daunting thinking about getting a science career off the ground right now,” Wall said. “Funding sources are so unstable. There’s a lot of political uncertainty.”
Even so, Wall said she was still doing the science she wanted to work on “despite all that.” Her research looks at how juniper trees react to drought conditions in the Southwest. “The system they’re adapted to from time immemorial — that’s all changing with climate change,” she said. “That’s the kind of thing we come here to work on.”
The communications system the researchers were accustomed to was also under stress. Although dozens of Forest Service, U.S. Geological Survey, and other federal land management officials were presenting or participating, none were willing to talk on the record with a reporter without getting approval from headquarters. Meanwhile, hallway conversation bounced from one long-term data set after another suffering from missed reporting periods, funding and staff cuts or political interference. One university professor anonymously warned it will take decades to recover from the gaps, along with a steep decline in research papers published, student internships offered and lab jobs funded.
“There’s so much turmoil right now in the natural resources and agency world,” said Conroy, the UM doctoral student. “But a lot of folks are seeing it as opportunity. I hope everyone is choosing hope. That’s what I’m choosing.”
