Científicos del Parque
Fred Swanson
Research Geologist (retired), Pacific Northwest Research Station, US Forest Service.
“I have been working on volcanoes in Chile since 2009, in collaboration with Julia Jones, Jorge Romero, Charlie Crisafulli and others, as part of studies of the effects of eruptions on the forests and rivers of Mount St. Helens (USA). We have studied the recent eruptions of Chilean volcanoes Chaiten, Cordón Caulle-Puyehue and Calbuco.”
I am a retired research geologist from the US Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station; courtesy professor in the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society at Oregon State University; Senior Fellow of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word (Oregon State University); and leader of the science side of the Long Term Ecological Reflections program. Through collaboration with humanities colleagues at the Spring Creek Project over the past 20 years, I have helped facilitate writers and artists’ engagement with the old-growth forests of the Andrews Experimental Forest in the Oregon Cascades and the Mount St. Helens in southwest Washington. Trained as a geologist and specialized in the study of disturbance agents in forest ecosystems and watersheds (fires, floods, landslides, volcanic eruptions, clear logging, forest roads), it has been natural for me to connect with cultural disturbance agents: poets and artists. Co-authored or co-edited books include: Sediment Budgets and Routing in Forest Watersheds (U.S. Forest Service 1982), Bioregional Assessments (Island Press 1999), Road Ecology (Island Press 2003), Ecological Responses to the Eruption of Mount St. Helens (Springer 2005), In the Blast Zone (Oregon State University Press 2008), and Forest Under Story (University of Washington Press 2016).
