For immediate release: November 15, 2002
For more information, contact Susan Griffith, 216-368-1004 or sbg4@po.cwru.edu

CLEVELAND—Folklore has it that a squirrel once could travel from Lake Erie to the Ohio River by jumping from one tree to another. After more than 100 years of foresting, some of those old trees may have survived the cutter's ax and human encroachment to leave behind a chapter of Ohio's biological history.

Paul Drewa

Case Western Reserve University's new ecologist Paul Drewa plans to search for and survey the Western Reserve for the remnants of those old beech-maple woods. Upon his arrival at the University in August and during visits to CWRU's Squire Valleevue and Valley Ridge Farms in Hunting Valley where his research base will be centered, he discovered his first fragments.

In his first months on campus, he is in the process of collaborating with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and the Holden Arboretum in this research that he plans eventually to expand across northern Ohio.

"People are concerned about the tropical rainforests, but the cool, hardwood temperate forests of the north are vanishing also and share some of those same concerns found in the rainforests," Drewa said.

It is also an area that few have studied in northeastern Ohio. He added that "this void needs to be filled."

"These studies can be a vehicle to address questions relevant to my field of population biology and community ecology. At the same time, these studies will form a basis for conservation and management," the CWRU assistant professor of biology explained.

At Squire Valleevue Farm roughly 10 acres of old trees remain untouched by foresting. Where the farm's trees were forested, second growth woods have populated the landscape and offer comparison areas for study.

Drewa and CWRU graduate students are going to ask some of the same demographic questions posed in the study of human populations-but in an ecological context. These questions will relate to how survivorship, growth and recruitment of plant populations, as well as entire communities, are influenced by disturbances such as wind storms, grazing animals and human development and activity.

Drewa is a plant ecologist who specializes in disturbance theory. He studies changes to the environment that are natural or created by humans. One example is the role of fire in grasslands and forests, which can be initiated by both lightning strikes and humans.

He came to Northeast Ohio from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Jornada Experimental Range at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, where he was a postdoctoral research scientist. While there, he studied the fire ecology of Chihuahuan Desert grasslands. He notes that those grasslands were once frequented by fires, and thus were a part of the natural ecosystem.

"People often view fire as a bad thing, but if it occurs with some regularity, species evolve with fire and rely on it to complete their life cycles," he said. While looking at Ohio's native forests, he plans to keep his interest in fire ecology alive.

Drewa, a native of British Columbia in Canada, did his undergraduate and graduate work under Gary Bradfield at the University of British Columbia, where Drewa received bachelor's degree in 1989 and a master's degree in 1992. He then studied with Bill Platt and earned a doctorate in plant ecology from Louisiana State University in 1999, where his research on the fire ecology of southeastern longleaf pine savannas was acknowledged with the Edgerton Award for graduate research and with a nomination by the College of Basic Sciences for the LSU Distinguished Dissertation of 1999.

–CWRU–

 

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