The Siskiyou Field Institute: Supporting Science Education and Research 
in the Siskiyou Mountains and the Greater Klamath Region 
Jennifer Kaye Marsden and Erik S. Jules 
Siskiyou Field Institute, P.O. Box 220, Cave Junction, Oregon, 97523 
1-Tile Siskiyou Mountains and the greater Klamath Region 
I have long been known among ecologists as one of the 
JLmost botanically diverse areas in North America. This 
part of northwestern California and southwestern Oregon, of¬ 
ten called the Klamath-Siskiyou, includes an exceptional diver¬ 
sity in geological forms, topography, and climate, all of which 
contribute to the presence of a unique array of ecological com¬ 
munities. More than 3500 taxa of vascular plants occur in this 
region, including 281 endemic taxa (Smith and Sawyer 1988). 
The late Robert Whittaker, pioneering ecologist from Cornell 
University and the New York Botanical Garden, formally quan¬ 
tified Siskiyou plant diversity and brought the region to the 
attention of the field of ecology (Whittaker 1960, 1961). More 
recently, two of the best-known botanists of this region, Arthur 
Kruckeberg and Frank Lang (1997), wrote that 
....nowhere is such a rich display of landforms, geology, 
and an indigenous, richly endemic biota more grandly 
displayed in the American West. 
The richness in the Klamath-Siskiyou region's botanical 
diversity led the International Union for the Conservation of 
Nature to declare the region an Area of Global Botanical Sig¬ 
nificance in 1997. In a more recent study (Dellasalla et al. 1997), 
the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) identified the Klamath- 
Siskiyou as one of the ten richest temperate conifer forest 
ecoregions in the world (based on species richness, endemism, 
and beta diversity). WWF also selected the region to be one of 
their five conservation priorities in North America as extensive 
logging, mining, livestock grazing, and road building activities 
threaten to undermine the region's globally unique character. 
These designations result from years of research by numerous 
biologists and geologists who have come to study the unique¬ 
ness of the region (e.g., Whittaker 1954, Kruckeberg 1984, 
Smith and Sawyer 1988, Bury 1997). 
In the midst of such uniqueness, however, people living in 
the region have generally not had the opportunity to participate 
in the ongoing dialogue among scientists ’who work here, and 
in fact, many local residents are unaware of the outstanding 
ecological characteristics of the region. In the spring of 1997, 
the Siskiyou Regional Education Project (i.e., Siskiyou Project) 
coordinated the First Conference on Siskiyou Ecology in order 
to begin to address this problem and to provide a forum for 
researchers to convene and share their knowledge with each 
other. The conference was held in the Illinois River Valley of 
southwestern Oregon and was considered highly successful in 
building bridges between the scientific and local communities, 
encouraging more scientific research in the area, and educating 
participants about the ecological significance of the Siskiyous 
Students in the Siskiyou Field Institute Nature Writing course explore Rough and Ready Creek. 
Photo by Barbara Ullian. 
Kalmiopsis Volume 7, 2001 
17 
