 My name is Charlie Ray. I'm a forester working in northern Wisconsin, largely in Bayfield County. That's in the northern tip of the state, surrounded by Lake Superior. We've got a landscape that's dominated by a lot of what you see behind me here, an Aspen forest, which is early successional forest type that's come in after the historic cutover of the white pine and northern hardwoods that used to dominate this landscape. With the project funded through SARE, I've been working with private landowners to put in some study plots looking at alternatives to clear cutting Aspen. In particular, the question about whether you can thin an Aspen forest and create a climate that is productive for the next generation of a different forest cover type. We're looking at oak. We're looking at white pine as alternative cover types to the Aspen. The question is, how does it affect the landowner's income in the short run and in the long run? What would be the proper prescription for a harvest in order to meet the goal of transitioning these Aspen dominated forests to a longer lived, more diverse forest that would provide multiple income streams over the long term for landowners? A lot of private landowners, as well as citizens concerned about how the public lands are managed, have a version to completely clear cutting the landscape and have an interest in multiple goals and uses for the land, habitat goals, recreational goals, and income goals, as well. When you clear cut these landscapes, you regenerate a uniform age class of species and oftentimes only one or two species. So you're typically limiting your options down the road for harvest. You're not going to be harvesting anything on that site for another 50 years. So a lot of landowners, they look at their land. How long does a person live? How long are they going to enjoy their land? A lot of people would rather just let their trees fall down and die than have to stomach a complete clear cut of their land and wait 30 years before they have a forest to walk through again. So this provides people an alternative to maybe generate some income and maybe even speed up the succession of the forest to longer lived and more diverse species. A lot of people are thinking about the next generation and what kind of legacy they're leaving for their children or on the public lands. What is the legacy for our communities? And if you leave a legacy of one species that you have to harvest in 50 years and you don't have any other options for that time, that's a lot different legacy than a mixed forest in which a person might be able to come in in 20 years and then again in 40 years and then again in 60 years and perpetually have a small income stream and be generating a diversity of products. Most of this aspen forest type is harvested for pulpwood up here. It goes into range of low quality to higher quality paper products. Some of the aspen does reach a size that it can make plywood and higher value wood products but the aspen forest generally is not providing you know veneer wood, that's the highest value woods and structural timbers and other things that you know you get with pine, oak, northern hardwoods and the mixed forest. So the spot we're standing in is one of the plots that we have on this landowner's property and you can see blue marks on the sides of me. These are all trees that were tallied and on this tally sheet we're measuring the dvh, the merchantable height and the total height of all of these trees and the idea is we'll be able to return in another decade and determine whether we had an increase or decrease in the volume of the wood and what and then we're also looking at the understory and what sort of what the component is and the next forest that's coming in here. So with forestry of course we're growing species that we want to harvest in 60, 80, 100, 150 plus years so we don't necessarily know what the results are of our project on the typical agricultural cycle so the SARE project has been helpful in that regard and that we started this project on one landowner's property, implemented a harvest and we took data points before and after the harvest and then came back to SARE six years later and we're able to collect another round of data points as well as adding this property to the study so that we have yet another set of data and we hope to come back to this site in another five or ten years as well as the other property where we started because we really don't feel like we've got enough plots in to get all the answers at all and we think it's going to be a good 20 years before things sort themselves out and we really find what the results were of our harvest.