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Edward Stone

IN MEMORIAM

Edward C. Stone

Professor of Forestry, Emeritus

UC Berkeley

1917 – 2003

 

“Let’s go” was a call we all remember Ed Stone giving when he wanted to move a class of students through the woods or up the slopes of Spanish Peak at the University of California (UC) Forestry Summer Camp. Ed enthusiastically taught forest ecology at camp for 40 years as a member of the forestry faculty. He is also remembered by his summer camp students for his famous “teaspoon” transect. After their first breakfast at camp he would ask each student to bring their teaspoon into the forest and excavate a 100' long transect through the forest litter down to the mineral soil and map everything they encountered. This exercise revealed variations in forest litter, various forms of soil fungus, and a host of invertebrates living in the forest litter. It was characteristic of Ed’s teaching methods, which used novel approaches that directly engaged his students. Ed wanted to be on a first name basis with the students, and after spending three weeks with him at camp the students always called him Ed. Gwen Stone, Ed's wife, also played an important role at summer camp, where she accompanied Ed every summer. Her presence and kindness were always appreciated by the students.

 

Ed Stone completed his undergraduate work (B.S. in forestry, 1940) and his graduate work (Ph.D. in plant physiology, 1948) at the University of California, Berkeley. His Ph.D. dissertation concerned dormancy mechanisms in sugar pine. His work was the first to identify the role of the inner seed coat of sugar pine in restricting the movement of oxygen to the embryo and thus causing dormancy in the species.

 

Ed joined the faculty at Berkeley in 1949. His teaching assignments included courses in dendrology and forest ecology on the Berkeley campus and his annual course in forest ecology at Summer Camp. He also taught a graduate seminar in forest ecology. In 1970 his appointment was split between the Department of Forestry and the Department of Landscape Architecture, where he taught a graduate course in landscape ecology. Students in the landscape department remember him for admonishing them to ask “So what?” after any long discourse he or other faculty members may have presented in a lecture. The question was emblematic of his abiding interest in the application of knowledge.

 

During the Second World War, Ed served as a captain in the U.S. Army Military Police. His final assignment during the war was provost marshal for the Philippine Islands after U.S. forces had retaken the Philippines. That experience was invaluable to him in teaching the hundreds of forestry students who came to Berkeley on the G.I. Bill after the war. He demonstrated personal authority combined with an esprit de corps for the forestry program that students from that period always remember. Ed returned to the service during the Korean War and served in Washington, D.C., for three years.

 

Ed’s devotion to problem solving led him to research on issues of poor planting success following forest harvesting in California, vegetation management in California’s redwood parks, and the quantification of growing space requirements of forest trees. His pioneering research into the root regeneration potential of nursery grown forest tree seedlings demonstrated the cold requirement necessary for optimal regeneration of roots. This work resulted in a reorganization of nursery operations, seedling storage, and field planting in California as well as in other parts of the West. Prior to his research, as much as 85 percent of planted seedlings did not survive. After his research was applied the survival rate rose to as much as 90 percent. Ed was a proponent of understanding the ecology of forest types as a basis for developing vegetation management plans for state and national parks. His research in Humboldt Redwoods State Park led to an understanding of the impacts of flood and fire control on the structure and composition of the redwood forest. Management programs to restore fire and periodic floods to streamside forests stem from his research. His last research focused on the growing space requirements of redwood, white fir, and ponderosa pine in California forests. This work demonstrated the need for greater spacing in the initial planting and early thinning of trees grown in forest plantations. The results of his growing space research have been adopted by both private timber companies and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection for the design and management of forest plantations. Ed continued to be involved in research until the last year of his life.

 

Ed served on numerous campus committees throughout his long career. One of the most difficult of these was his membership on the Berkeley Student Conduct Committee during the Vietnam War, when a decision to expel students for inappropriate behavior could immediately subject them to the draft. This was a heavy burden for members of the committee. One expelled student refused the draft and served two years in federal prison. After the war he returned to Berkeley to make peace with Ed and continue his education. Ed hired him as an assistant and served as his mentor throughout his undergraduate and graduate programs, which led to a Ph.D.

 

Fly-fishing was one of Ed Stone’s great passions. His annual summer camp teaching assignment was punctuated with hikes into the Middle Fork of the Feather River to fish. In his later years he frequently fished with his former graduate students. Together they tempted fish in many of the streams in northern California and southern Oregon.

 

Ed was a member of the Society of American Foresters, among many other academic societies. He was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1959 he received a Fulbright Research Scholarship for work in New Zealand and a Guggenheim Fellowship for studies in Australia and South Africa. Following his retirement in 1988, Ed received the Berkeley Citation. The greatest tribute to his inspiration and teaching of forestry, however, is the fact that both of his sons, Brian and David, became professional foresters and served long and productive careers with the U.S. Forest Service. Ed was most proud of them.

 

 

Joe McBride

John Helms