Restoring an Ancient Forest: Wildfire Recovery in Opal Creek Wilderness

Our upcoming topic with include duo Jennifer Johns (Chemeketa Community College) and Megan Selvig (Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center) who teamed up in 2022 to create a community science project that investigates the recovery of six culturally relevant locations in the Opal Creek Scenic Recreation and Wilderness Areas following the 2020 Beachie Creek Fire. Four years into their data collection efforts with students, community members, and colleagues, Jennifer and Megan will share what they’ve been finding in the plant, lichen, and bird communities from areas that were severely burned to areas that were left mostly unburned. Join us for an evening with lots of photos, group activities, and hope for the future!

Megan Selvig is the Programs Director for Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center. She has been an environmental educator since 2009, beginning as a teacher/naturalist of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed before serving as an environmental conservation volunteer for Peace Corps Paraguay. Megan moved to Jawbone Flats/Opal Creek in 2015, where she enjoyed all four seasons of the Opal Creek Wilderness. She now lives in Portland, OR, but frequently returns to Opal Creek to monitor the recovery of the ancient forest after wildfire and to facilitate the return of people to a beloved and burned landscape.

Jennifer Johns was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, She went to college at Duke University in North Carolina, where she majored in Biology and German and played volleyball for the Blue Devils. After studying forestry near the Black Forest in Freiburg, Germany under the auspices of a D.A.A.D grant from the German government for a year, returning to her alma mater to work for a year, and working as an intern on a sustainable forestry project in the state of Para, Brazil for another year, She began graduate school at Rutgers University in New Jersey--where she earned my Ph.D. studying the reproductive biology of a tropical tree in forest fragments and in intact forests in Panama. In 2000 she moved to Oregon together with her family and began teaching biology, ecology, and sustainable agriculture part-time at Linfield College and at Willamette University. In 2014 she joined the full-time Biology faculty at Chemeketa, where she specializes in teaching the field based courses to non-majors, including Environmental Science, Marine Biology, and Ecology and Diversity. She also teaches Cell Biology to both non-majors and students in pre-health pathways. She feels especially lucky to teach non-majors classes because it allows her to share her passion for the outdoors and all the wonders of biology with students whose primary interests are different from hers, which makes every term feel like a wonderful adventure that they embark on together!