Keynote Speakers

Dr. Jerry Franklin

Widely known as the “guru of old-growth forests,” Dr. Jerry Franklin has a long history in forest ecology and forest management. He was a research forester for the USDA Forest Service for many years, beginning in 1959. Since then, he has established a legacy of long-term experiments designed to enrich the science of future generations. His knowledge of the distinctive and vital attributes of old-growth forests, as well as his understanding of natural disturbances and the ecosystem recovery process, have placed him on many local, national, and global commissions dedicated to scientific and policy analyses of forest issues.

Dr. Franklin was director of the ecosystem studies program for the National Science Foundation and president of the Ecological Society of America, among other positions. In 1993, he was among the scientists who assembled with President Clinton to discuss old-growth preserves, logging practices, and threatened and endangered species.

Dr. Franklin has also been dubbed the “father of new forestry.” He is one of the country’s leading authorities on sustainable forest management, and his once-unconventional views on forest management have since become established practice.

Bob Leverett

Bob Leverett is co-founder of the Native Tree Society, co-founder and President of Friends of Mohawk Trail State Forest, Chair of the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation Forest Reserves Science Advisory Committee, and co-author of the American Forests Champion Tree-Measuring Guidelines Handbook. Educated as an engineer, Bob is a recognized expert in the discipline of measuring trees for both science and sport. Currently, he is working with climate scientists to help measure carbon sequestration in individual trees. Co-author of several books, including the Sierra Club Guide to Ancient Forests of the Northeast, he has been the central figure in the Ancient Eastern Forests Conference Series. A co-discoverer of most of the known old growth in Massachusetts, his association with old-growth forest confirmations dates to the middle 1980s.

Lynda Mapes

Lynda Mapes is a newspaper reporter and author, an explorer and reveler in the natural world, native plants and species of every sort. She is driven to go deep, look long, stay awhile.

Her photos and journalism and books are the result of a lifelong fascination with the natural world and our connection to it. She works from all five senses — and especially, the critical sixth: a sense of wonder.

Lynda covers environmental and Indigenous issues for the Seattle Times. She is author of six books, including most recently The Trees Are Speaking: Dispatches from the Salmon Forests, due to be published this year; and Orca: Shared Waters, Shared Home, winner of the 2021 National Outdoor Book Award and the 2021 Washington State Book Award for nonfiction. Her journalism has earned numerous prestigious awards, including the international 2019 and 2012 Kavli gold award for science journalism from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is also an associate of the Harvard Forest of Harvard University, in Petersham, MA.

Tom Spies

Tom Spies is Emeritus Scientist with the USDA Forest Service, PNW Research Station. He is also courtesy professor in the College of Forestry, Oregon State University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He has over 45 years of research experience in forests of the Pacific Northwest, Australia, the Lake States, and New England. His areas of expertise include forest ecology, wildfire, effects of forest management on wildfire and wildlife habitat, conservation of old-growth forests, and socio-ecological systems.

Tom is co-editor, with Sally Duncan, of the just-published Old Growth in a New World: A Pacific Northwest Icon Reexamined. This book untangles the complexities of the old growth concept and the parallel complexity of old-growth policy and management. It brings together more than two dozen contributors — ecologists, economists, sociologists, managers, historians, silviculturists, environmentalists, timber producers, and philosophers — to offer a broad suite of perspectives on changes that have occurred in the valuing and management of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest over the past thirty years.