Jeff Ward is a scientist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. He began his career there in 1987, after completing a PhD in forest ecology from Purdue University. Jeff’s research spans a number of topics in forest management and stem dynamics, including deer browse and invasive species impact, prescribed fire, and storm resistance. When not wandering in the woods with his wife Lil, Jeff is usually working in the garden, playing with his grandkids, or rooting for the Ohio State Buckeyes.
I grew up in northern Ohio, about an hour west of Cleveland. I was fortunate to have woods in back of the house. We’d swing from vines, make forts underneath blackberry bushes – pricker forts – and played in the cricks, as we’d say. I was always playing out in the woods. I think every kid should have the opportunity to have someplace nearby where they can just get out in the middle of the woods.
I started college at Ohio State in the organic chemistry pre-med track, and after a year and a half of being in a lab, I realized that I had to be outdoors. I switched my major to natural resource management and the first couple of forestry courses I took, it just seemed like everything just made sense. I really liked the math that was involved. I liked the combination of getting to be outdoors and doing math – sampling and statistics. I completed my bachelor’s and started a master’s degree in silviculture right away but just got burnt out.
So, I went to Guatemala to do the Peace Corps for two and half years and rediscovered the roots of forestry down there. I honestly couldn’t tell you what got me down there, but I just knew I needed to get out of school, and I knew I wanted to be doing something worthwhile. It was an opportunity to do forestry but not be in school. We were doing reforestation work, which was interesting because when an area was harvested there, there were so many sheep and goats it was hard to get trees growing again. It was fun being somebody from the flatlands of the Midwest suddenly living at 7,000 or 8,000 feet and working up to 11,000 feet.
When I came back, I finished up my master’s degree at Ohio State and then went to Purdue and got my PhD in forest ecology there. I went on to do my PhD because I just wanted to figure out new things and understand how things work. The project I had was in a true old growth forest in Indiana, where there were 350-year-old burr oaks that were over top of 200-year-old red oaks. The study began in 1926, so I was looking at 60 years of stand dynamics. The big burr oaks were five, six feet in diameter, and the red oaks were like two feet in diameter. It was great except there was also four-foot-high stinging nettle mosquito hotels at the site. Peter Smallidge, who’s now over at Cornell, was my student assistant. We spent the summer working there and sleeping on a barn floor.
I gave a talk at a conference in Tennessee and got hired by the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station before I finished my PhD. George Stevens, who was the chief scientist there, was sitting right next to my professor and they started talking. I had a wife and three kids at that point, so any job would have been good, but I got lucky. The study I was hired for in Connecticut had started in 1926, just a week after when the study I was following for my PhD had started. In just a couple of years, it’ll be 100 years of following these over 50,000 trees and looking at their stem dynamics. It is so freaking amazing. I love to look at all the old notebooks and at everything drawn out on draft paper. The original records and notes from 100 years ago are amazing.
One of the neat things about forestry is it’s one of the few multigenerational fields. You never see a process from start to finish. You finish up what somebody started, 20, 40, 80 years ago, and then you set up projects, knowing that the people come after you will finish them up, long in the future. Forestry in the Northeast, it’s like being a gardener. Down South, they’re farming pine trees with 20-year rotations – it’s like growing really tall corn. Up here, we’re like English gardeners: we have a wide variety of species and sites, and we’re growing things that take a hundred years or more to grow before you can harvest them. So you need to make sure you’re starting other things to keep your garden going well.
When I first came to Connecticut in 1987, invasive plants weren’t much of an issue. There was barberry out in the woods, but other things weren’t here: bittersweet, Japanese stiltgrass, Japanese knotweed. But the deer have browsed all the natives, and invasives are resistant, so it gives them an opening. I remember watching elms die out in Ohio in the ’60s and ’70s, but now we’ve got hemlock woolly adelgid and red pine scale and emerald ash borer. And it’s looking like we’re going to lose beech. And yeah, the forester part of me hated beech when I was trying to regenerate a stand, but the ecologist in me thought beech was great. We don’t have a lot of hard mast species, other than our oaks and hickories. Either way though, you just don’t want to see another important component of our forest being lost. It is so freaking sad to see. We need to keep as many parts as we have, because Lord knows how the climate is going to change. It’s a real shame to see how these insects and diseases and invasive plants are changing the forest, and it’s going to be a real challenge for the next generation of foresters.
Another thing is in Connecticut we have a really high deer herd. With slash walls, it’s been just mind blowing to see how different it is when you can keep deer out of an area. We’ve been seeing a ton of pokeberry come up in those areas. We see oak seedlings, and they can actually grow. When you take the deer out, the native stuff can outcompete the invasives, so we just generally see a lot more diversity of vegetation on the inside. Deer hunting is political though, some people are adamantly opposed to hunting and some hunters even don’t want to see the herd reduced. Of course, real hunters like to hunt, but there’s some out there who just want to shoot and for it to be easy.
Ecological studies are important to understand how things work; forestry is really applied ecology. Forestry is the practice, where you see if you know what you’re talking about. Another thing is it pays the bills. You have to be a rich country to have forests, especially areas that aren’t harvested. That's a luxury that we have; not every place in the world is able to keep forest as forest. Then there’s the challenge of figuring out how to have the ecological, the aesthetic and the economic benefits all rolled into one.
I’ve had great advisers, people like George Stevens, who some of the old timers in New England might remember. David Smith stopped by my office right when I started in New Haven, and I was sitting in my office on a phone call. This elderly man, slight build, knocked on my door and I held up my finger to say, “Just a minute.” He just stood there patiently for five minutes while I was on the phone. I got off the phone and it was him, this world-famous professor from Yale, just waiting to introduce himself and say welcome. It’s that kind of personality that I think really exemplifies forestry professionals. Some of the best mentors I’ve had have been field foresters, people who say, “I’ve noticed something interesting, and I wonder if you could take a look.” They notice things, they help in research, and they implement practices. The most meaningful is when we try out something and then it’s suddenly used on the landscape – and seeing people become more aware, especially about work we did on how invasives are linked to Lyme disease, and getting people to think about deer browse. The general public is much more aware now. Some people still see the forest as a diorama and aren’t aware this is all second growth from old pastures, but I think more people get it now.
I was with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station for 35 years. I retired 3 years ago, as far as getting a paycheck goes, but I still consider it my work and do about 20 hours a week. Few foresters actually step away from the field when they retire; the work just changes. Once you have the woods in your blood, you don't want to leave. There are some projects I’d like to finish up: in a couple more years I’ll get to 40 years following some 10-year-old sapling stands. That’s about 5,000 to 6,000 trees, not huge set, but good to do some modeling on how trees sort themselves out over time. And then the 100th year anniversary is coming up for the project that began in 1926. I’m fortunate to see this continue. We have an outstanding young scientist, Elizabeth Ward (not a relation), who we hired a couple of years ago, and she’ll take on her own projects too, continuing this multi-generational work.
It’s great going back and seeing the same trees. I think everyone who goes in the woods has their own special trees, and they become almost like old friends. I go back and visit them once a year and see how they’re doing. The biggest satisfaction from the work is actually just being out there observing nature. Just having honking geese go overhead or having deer walk by and not even know you're there. No matter how bad of a mood you go out with in in the morning, you never come out of the woods in a bad mood.