Dan Luoma Oral History, 2005

[00:00:00] Elizabeth Uhlig:
This is an oral history with Dan Luoma. Today is January 20th, 2005. This is Elizabeth Uhlig, the archivist, and we're in the archives at Lane Community College. Dan, to start out with, could you tell us where you were born and raised?

[00:00:17] Dan Luoma:
Well, I was not quite born in Roseburg, but I was raised in Roseburg, born in Portland, and went all through grade school, high school in Roseburg.

[00:00:28] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Uh-huh. Is your family still there?

[00:00:30] Dan Luoma:
And my mother is still in Roseburg.

[00:00:35] Elizabeth Uhlig:
How did you decide to come to LCC?

[00:00:38] Dan Luoma:
You know, I was asked that question during one of the video production sessions, and I said something during that, and then I realized later I had forgotten, perhaps the more main reason I had come was that I had my girlfriend at the time was going to the U of O. And so there was another motivation for coming up to the Eugene area, to go to school, as opposed to Umpqua Community College, where I had taken some summer classes. So I think that I remembered about that later.

[00:01:19] Elizabeth Uhlig:
From the beginning, did you know you were going to be studying botany and mushrooms?

[00:01:25] Dan Luoma:
By then I did, because this was after I had been working in the mill. I'd worked in that mill for 13 months, and it was during that period that I came to realize I wanted to know more about how forests, or kind of ecology in general, worked. But when I arrived here, I didn't really know more than that, although I wanted, I knew I was, the first registration session was held in perhaps a gymnasium here or something at the time. And I was signing up for biology classes in particular, and I had signed up for three different classes of Biology 101. And then I went to turn in my paperwork, and the person sitting there counseled me that, well, you know, you can only transfer three credits of Biology 101, not nine. And I said, well, gosh, you know, okay, I'll have to decide. And so right there on the spot, I decided it would be biology101-mushrooms. And unbeknownst to me, the person I was talking to was Freeman Rowe.

[00:02:54] Elizabeth Uhlig:
In one of the articles I read that said you had a photograph of a mushroom above your workstation at the mill?

[00:03:03] Dan Luoma:
You know, sometimes in the journalistic endeavors, things get a little bit crossed. I noticed that because I've been interviewed for several different kinds of articles. And in that case, the photograph actually came towards the time I was about to finish working at the mill. And so I'd saved up a bunch of money to go back to school. And I was interested in photography conceptually, but I didn't own a camera. So I bought myself a nice camera. And somewhere in there, one of the first pictures I took was of a mushroom. And so to me, that was maybe something of a premonition that, well, when I was faced with this choice from Freeman, as it turned out, maybe I thought about that picture. Well, yeah, I'm interested in mushrooms. I'll go with mushrooms. So it really wasn't in the mill, but it did play a part.

[00:04:02] Elizabeth Uhlig:
So did your chance meeting with Freeman then, did he influence you in mushrooms, or that was just an interest that you had?

[00:04:13] Dan Luoma:
That was sort of a little bit of a spur-of-the-moment decision. As I said, perhaps influenced by that notion, well, I've been photographing mushrooms. I'd like to know more about them. But then in his class, he was a phenomenally inspiring teacher.

[00:04:31] Elizabeth Uhlig:
So was his class then specifically?

[00:04:33] Dan Luoma:
I mean, one of his three... Yes. So then that turned out to be, his series was Biology 101, starting with mushrooms. One of two was Marine Bio... Intertidal Biology. And then 103 in the spring was wildflowers.

[00:04:49] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Did you take all three of them?

[00:04:51] Dan Luoma:
I took all three. And then I sort of took them again. The following year, I was taking other classes, but I hung out with him a lot on field trips and whatnot as much as I could.

[00:05:07] Elizabeth Uhlig:
What did you do on these field trips?

[00:05:11] Dan Luoma:
Well, originally, they were to teach us the different groups of mushrooms. So we would go out on a mushroom hunt.

Well, as I remember it, your first experience, you're really at a loss. On the one hand, they sort of all look the same, but on the other hand, there's a bewildering variety. So it's always taking something to Freeman and asking him to tell you something about it. And now I'm on the other end of that, I lead mushroom hikes and classes. And it's the same experience where people are bringing me something and then you have to come up with a way to communicate about it to the student. And that's what Freeman was so good at, was communicating about these mysterious objects in a way that conveyed some fairly complex details. But it was a bigger interesting picture. He really put the role of the mushrooms in the forest in that full context of what's going on in the forest.

[00:06:35] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Did you collect mushrooms for the herbarium for documentation purposes?

[00:06:43] Dan Luoma:
Well, I don't know if that was existed at that time. I suspect he had a teaching collection, and some of those specimens would come back.

Of course, we would use them in the labs, in the lab sessions, looking at them under microscopes. You really can't identify mushrooms, most of them satisfactory, without some kind of microscopic work. And learning biology, since it's a general biology class, using mushrooms as a model. You have to learn a lot more about them than just their names, a lot about basic biological principles using the mushrooms. But I do remember he had quite a number of dried specimens on the final test for identification. So it would be a mixture of fresh specimens, maybe even some photographs and dried specimens. So he made it challenging, even though it was fun along the way.

[00:07:51] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Where did you go on these hunts?

[00:07:54] Dan Luoma:
Well, the first one, I think, was right here, south of campus, in the little woods there. We went up to Mackenzie. I think, perhaps, we went as far as the north of Santiam. And over to the coast, the college has a facility at, I forget the name of the lake right now.

[00:08:14] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Silkus?

[00:08:15] Dan Luoma:
Yeah, and so there were, I think, a couple field trips to Silkus.

In an article, or in an interview, Gail Baker, who now teaches here at Lane, said that Lane is well known for its field-based curriculum, for a non-botany specialist person.

[00:08:38] Elizabeth Uhlig:
What does that mean when you say a field-based curriculum?

[00:08:42] Dan Luoma:
That means the students, in my opinion, get to spend a lot of time outdoors, learning about biology in the field, and using the term field as a long tradition in biology. And it just means using the outdoors as your laboratory, and learning about living things in place. So that's the derivation of using that term, and why I think it's so much of an advantage that you don't get it in a lot of other kinds of situations. You sit in a classroom, you learn out of a textbook, you're supposed to remember lists of facts or whatever, and it is, in my opinion, less effective than getting out and making that personal contact with what it is you're trying to learn about. So it really augments text-based learning, learning about theory, and I think brings about more enthusiasm for whatever it is you're trying to learn. It's more hands-on in that way.

[00:10:03] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Is Lane different from other community colleges or other university programs with this focus or emphasis on field-based study?

[00:10:12] Dan Luoma:
Well, I think it can be. Southern Oregon University certainly has a natural resources program that emphasizes field-based studies. But I don't know, not having gone to a lot of different schools myself, but I can envision where you might go to a larger university and just be stuck in a peer lecture lab situation and never get out. I always sought out opportunities to take courses that have field components, so I biased my own experience along the way into doing that.

It certainly is a strength, in my opinion, here.

[00:11:01] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Did you take other courses outside of this three series?

[00:11:05] Dan Luoma:
Well, at the same time, I was taking the Zoology 200 series, and that complimented it quite well because they were both biology. Let's see, I think I did one full year of quite a bit of biology here at Lane, and then I started also taking classes at the U of O at the same time, so I think I did a second year of getting some of my... When I went to U of O, I realized, again, the field-based biology courses were in the geography department, or you could choose to have a field-based curriculum in geography drawing on those biology courses in the biology department or landscape architecture that offered field-based ecology. Because the biology program at the University of Oregon is more geared towards the sort of pre-med, pre-dental laboratory biology, organic chemistry route, and that wasn't the route I wanted to go,

so I did this kind of hybrid transition year, finding out what it was at U of O I wanted while finishing up some things here, and then I ended up graduating.

Yeah, that was one of my questions, is how you made the switch into geography and what that field offered that attracted you. There were a number of things, and this sort of relates to your question on the field-based programs here at Lane, and that is, I found that the biology major at the University of Oregon was very large classes in general, at least when they were starting out, and there was an administrative level effort made to separate the students from the professors because it was so highly competitive for these pre-med and pre-dental students. You were supposed to be a number and not a person, so there wouldn't be any bias or favoritism in deciding who does and who doesn't get to go to medical school, is basically what it came down to. So that's another attraction I found in the geography department, it was the opposite philosophy, it was relatively small classes, the professors wanted to get to know the various majors,

they had undergraduate seminars for geography majors with the professors in small groups and you got to know them real well, and so it just fit what I wanted to do better than this huge biology program.

[00:14:09] Elizabeth Uhlig:
How did that compare then with at OSU, because you went there for your graduate work?

[00:14:13] Dan Luoma:
Well, once you're in the graduate program, then that's going to be a smaller program anyway. I found that I was very well prepared, both in my training from Lane and U of O for the field I wanted to go in, which is plant geography, slash ecology, slash mycology. So, yeah, I found the classes there, as a graduate student, you pretty much picked all the best classes that you wanted.

[00:14:56] Elizabeth Uhlig:
So how did you, what was it about mushrooms that interested you, and how did that relate then to this interest in ecology and ecosystems?

[00:15:07] Dan Luoma:
Yeah, I think perhaps what first interested me in mushrooms was somewhat their form, and their sort of reputation as being something mysterious in the forest, but then as I learned more about them rather quickly, I became very struck by fundamental importance of their role biologically in a forest. So I learned about their function in a forest, and that's what became, you know, that's what stimulated me academically. There was relatively little known about this particular group of mushrooms that come from what are called ectomycorrhizal fungi. And after I learned about that symbiosis between tree roots and fungi, and how essential, vital it is to the health of the trees, and what a wide open field it was needed to be investigated, that's the track I saw and really wanted to follow on that. But not totally wanting to let go of the botany side of it either.

And so when you have a symbiosis between the roots of a plant and a fungus, then you do get, in my view, the best of both worlds. So I can follow on the plant ecology side and the mycological side in the same line of study. What was your dissertation on? Well, let's see, what was that title? It was something about, well, essentially, to condense it down, someone pointed out that at 21 words, it was too long of a title. It had to do with truffle-forming fungi at the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest, which is right up at the Mackenzie of Blue River. And so I looked at different types of forest, comparing age classes of forest and different moisture classes of forest for the different kinds of truffle fungi that were found there.

[00:17:24] Elizabeth Uhlig:
After you finished at OSU then, what was your first job? Have you always been in Corvallis?

[00:17:30] Dan Luoma:
Yeah, one could wonder, did I ever finish at OSU?

While I was, you know, wrapping up the dissertation, I started doing some, well, it's a grant-funded project from a place called Orion Garden Products, which grew a lot of conifers for the nursery trade, ornamental conifers, Austrian black pine, some kind of Italian pine, a wide variety of conifers. And many of them were ectomycorrhizal, so I had some expertise in that area. And at that time we were, it was becoming more known that you could reduce your nitrogen, your fertilizing costs, in a nursery if you have healthy fungi on the roots. Because the fungus, one of its functions is to bring nutrients out of the mineral soil to the roots. And in exchange, it gets the carbon that's made by the needles in the tree.

So when they're adding all this nitrogen, they're basically depressing or even killing the fungi on the roots, which makes it necessary to add more nitrogen so the roots can take it up because the fungus isn't there to do it efficiently. So they weren't really interested in doing some experiments and seeing if they could reduce their nitrogen inputs, which of course eventually affects the groundwater. So that didn't work out for them, but it was one of the first projects I did after I got my PhD.

[00:19:18] Elizabeth Uhlig:
In your career then, what type of research have you done and has it frequently then been with industry and like the forest service?

[00:19:31] Dan Luoma:
That was probably the only private industry research grant that I worked on. And I said it didn't work out for them because they were then acquired by a larger, it was a relatively small family owned company. It was acquired by a larger company that then had financial trouble, so we didn't get to finish that research. But then I did quickly move into doing research based mostly on US Forest Service lands, mainly funded by the Forest Service research, but sometimes by the National Science Foundation. I also got some grants from them.

[00:20:16] Elizabeth Uhlig:
And what kind of research did you do?

[00:20:21] Dan Luoma:
This was during a time of change and emphasis from this more purely applied exploration of the symbiosis of the mycorrhizae to a time when we became more interested in biodiversity, which is my more central interest anyway. So what I ended up doing was quite a bit of research that kind of bridged the traditional dichotomy, either did applied or basic research. So I tried to do basic research, but in kind of an applied arena so that you could provide the Forest Service with information that they could use to lessen the biological impacts of logging, something like that.

[00:21:26] Elizabeth Uhlig:
You said that you do lead workshops or field studies. Are these parts of courses at OSU?

[00:21:35] Dan Luoma:
Well, we have offered workshops through what's called the College of Forestry Conference Office, something like that. And those were primarily designed for resource specialists employed by various federal agencies, so they could come up to speed on the importance of fungi in the forests, be it for wild edible fungi or for sensitive species by diversity kinds of questions. Wildlife managers might want to know the importance of truffles to the diets of a flying squirrel, which then has impacts on managing endangered species like a spotted owl. So there was a wide variety of interests from agency resource specialists. Then a few years ago, what's called the Siskiyou Field Institute formed, and they were interested in providing educational programs in southwest Oregon, which has perhaps the highest biodiversity of any area of Oregon, and yet is one of the least studied areas.

And I had been doing some research in the Siskiyous, and so they contacted me about first giving a lecture at one of their conferences, and then that grew into offering some classes on forest mycology, so the role of fungi in forests. And that's now evolved to a one-week-long field class, which is open to the general public.

[00:23:23] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Was that area, there was a huge forest fire, what, two years, some years ago? Did that impact your area and what you were studying?

[00:23:32] Dan Luoma:
It did. In the early 1990s, I started the research on the west side of the Calmyopsis wilderness area, and our research area was just outside the wilderness. And then, of course, in 2002, I think it was, the biscuit fire burned through almost the entire wilderness and came out and stopped halfway through the research area I had been doing that work in. So we had some study areas where we already had information about the truffles and mushrooms that grew there. Half of it burned and half of it didn't. So now we've had the opportunity to go back and see the influence of fire on truffle and mushroom production, and perhaps I'll have the opportunity to get another grant to see what's actually happened to the roots of the trees there, and that symbiosis itself.

Because now with DNA fingerprinting, that's been another huge development during my career, is the ability to use DNA fingerprinting technology and to be able to identify the fungi that are forming the symbiosis right on the root. So you don't have to rely on this ephemeral reproductive structure, which is the mushroom or the truffle, much like an apple on a tree. If there's a bad apple crop or you're there at the wrong time, there aren't any apples on the tree, so you don't know what's... If you had to just study the apples, you wouldn't know what was going on. So that's given us a whole new tool to work with, and it's real exciting to be able to do that. Does it seem that the fire destroyed a lot of the mushrooms and the roots that are... Well, yes. In areas where the fire burned very hot and killed all the trees or the seedlings or whatever, it burned through different kinds of habitat.

In those areas, we didn't find any more mushrooms or truffles post fire. That were mycorrhizal. Now, of course, there were morels, which are choice-edible wild mushrooms, and they're known to come in after fires. And other lesser-known, what we call, perhaps, fireplace fungi or phenylchoid fungi after the phoenix rising from the ashes. There's a suite of fungi that come in on the kind of decaying dead matter after a fire. But the ones I study, the mycorrhizal ones that are dependent on live trees, of course, were knocked back. But also interesting, even in the areas that had green trees, where it was an underburn, that first fall, the truffles and mushrooms were reduced. But by the following spring, we were finding truffles again, because the roots were still basically healthy. They just had to build up a little bit more energy reserves and some of that mycelium from the fungus up into the top layers.

The very top layer of the soil is probably pasteurized or something from the steam and the heat of the fire going over it.

[00:26:52] Elizabeth Uhlig:
You had said that that area of the Ciscus is one of the most diverse areas. Why is that?

[00:26:59] Dan Luoma:
Well, as I understand current theory about plate tectonics, the Klamath Mountains themselves came from another piece of geological formation and rammed into North America. So right there, it's bringing this weird geology that has what's called serpentine in it. Then it also sits at a crossroads of northern flora and southern flora. So you get a lot of plants that are coming from the south and others that are coming from the north that can colonize that area. And then the way the various valleys are oriented, you get a lot of aspects in different compass directions. So the sun shines different ways in different valleys, so a whole lot of different climatic types, elevationally, from sea level to whatever is Mount Ashland is 9,000-some feet, for instance. I guess it really wasn't affected by the last ice age, so it could be something of a refugia for a mountain species that might have been wiped out to the north by glaciation.

So there's a whole list of factors that have combined to make it a really diverse area botanically, and I suspect mycologically. And if I get a chance to continue my research in the Ciscus, it's one of my goals for this kind of part of my career now, if I could really build on that.

[00:28:38] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Have you ever been tempted to leave Oregon?

[00:28:43] Dan Luoma:
Not too tempted. No, I haven't. For someone like myself interested in biogeography in general and our flora and mycota in particular, this is a great place in the world to be. There's a lot to learn, has a lot to offer. We don't have too many poisonous snakes.

[00:29:07] Elizabeth Uhlig:
I noticed in some of the articles that you've traveled around the country and internationally at conferences, and so do you do that to study or to learn or to just share what's happening in Oregon?

[00:29:26] Dan Luoma:
Mostly I'm doing that to present the results of my research to an international audience and then to learn from the results of other people's research in an international setting. One time I took a mini sabbatical to Sweden to learn and study more with colleagues in a department of forest mycology at the Swedish Agricultural University in Uppsala. So in that case, it was more learning on my part about what they were doing, but also, of course, whatever I was able to contribute to them, I did.

[00:30:07] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Have you found other areas of the world in Sweden that are similar to Oregon?

[00:30:14] Dan Luoma:
Well, in terms of my studies and say the diversity of fungi that you might find or forest types, the northern boreal forests in general tend to be a little bit simpler but nonetheless beautiful and fantastically interesting places. In their own right, in Australia, my mentor at Oregon State, his name is Jim Trappie, and he established a research relationship with scientists in Australia 15 or maybe even 20 years ago now, which was virtually unexplored for truffle fungi in particular. I've been able to go work with him a little bit over there. He has just found that it's fantastically diverse. The eucalyptus trees there, there are hundreds of species of eucalyptus trees that grow in all different kinds of environments throughout the continent. It's a tremendously large area, and he's literally discovered hundreds of previously undescribed species of truffles, so certainly there are places in the world equally exciting.

I guess if some place might be tempting for me to leave Oregon, it might be something like Australia, another tremendous opportunity for new discoveries.

[00:31:47] Elizabeth Uhlig:
I wanted to ask you about the matsutake mushrooms. What's going on there? One of the articles said Oregon was one of the top producing areas. Why is that?

[00:32:11] Dan Luoma:
I guess we could go back in time quite a bit and think about perhaps northern forests in general and the northern hemisphere sort of being interconnected in this particular fungus or group of species, similar species of fungi. We refer to as matsutake, evolving and spreading throughout the northern hemisphere. We ended up with a particular species called the American pine mushroom or American matsutake, something like that. That is distributed even down into Mexico, but is particularly abundant in northern California, parts of western Oregon, east side of the Cascades, and up into British Columbia, southeast Alaska. There are probably a number of interrelated factors. It is mycorrhizal. It forms this symbiosis with tree roots. It seems to be tolerant of drought stress, so we have our dry summers here.

Many other places in the world it grows have wet summers, so that's kind of a good indicator that maybe these classifications of these similar mushrooms, separate species, is good. They seem to have different ecologies.

Then probably forest fires also have a role to play there, because the matsutake seem to be more vigorous in stands of trees that are not overgrown and that are perhaps you'd say the variety of ages doesn't seem to be restricted to single age classes. You can find it under relatively young pine stands on the coast and sand dunes. You can find it in old growth stands in the Cascades. You can find it in mixed hardwood and conifer stands in southwest Oregon. I guess Hemlock and Spruce forests in British Columbia and Alaska, so it seems to be widely adaptable also. There's a commercial aspect to it. They're popular in Japan. They're popular in Japan.

[00:34:57] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Is the cart before the horse? They were popular in Japan and then they found that they grew here.

[00:35:02] Dan Luoma:
Yes, that's a big part of it. Also, the decline of the crop in Japan was another stimulus. I think primarily due to disease of the trees in Japan, but perhaps also due to changing land use, maybe conversion of forests to other land uses, the traditional crop there has dropped by a large proportion. They started looking to import similar mushrooms that are considered to be almost as good. As I said, we have this species here. We call it tricoloma magnavallari. They have the true tricoloma matsutake. It looks a little different. It is somewhat different. They have a very similar aroma and flavor. That's what you're interested in is that aroma and flavor. The tradition was already there, the cultural tradition of using that even as gifts or something very special. I guess it was around 1990, perhaps, that there were beginning to be more exports to Japan. Then by 1992, I had been asked to participate in setting up some studies.

Those studies were going pretty full bore in the mid-90s, just as the price and the whole commercial harvest peaked around 1997, approximately 95-97.

Then I think other international market forces kicked in. I don't know exactly whether or not there were cycles in the crop in adjacent countries in Asia that just happened to be more productive or market mechanisms of getting them to Japan improved or whatever. As I understand it, now a lot more of their crop comes from adjacent Asian nations. There's less demand for the matsutake from North America. The price has come down quite a bit from those earlier years. There's still a good market for it. It still goes for more than the chanterelles go for. They're still picked commercially. These are natural mushrooms. You don't farm them. They're totally natural.

[00:37:58] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Is there a danger or over-harvesting? Is that an issue?

[00:38:04] Dan Luoma:
I was asked to look at the over-harvesting issue from the perspective of how they're harvested in particular. Now, we did also set up some what were to be long-term study plots to look at the amount of harvest over time, if that was declining.

But for some reason, that particular question fell out of favor. In fact, our so-called permanent long-term study plots were turned over for commercial harvest. They have now been open to anyone with a permit to pick on them for a couple of years now. But to get back to the other study where we looked at how they were harvested, that was a real concern. That if you were using a rake, which people were doing, to rake through the soil and break all those roots that the mushroom is coming from, in trying to find the very best, smallest mushrooms, then you could be damaging the resource. We did some experiments doing different kinds of raking and comparing that with places right in the same area that weren't raked. And we did indeed find a deleterious effect from heavy raking without putting things back and that sort of thing. So the Forest Service used that information both as an educational tool and as a regulatory tool.

And what they did was they were really proactive in explaining a variety of languages, because you have knickers from Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Mexico, or Hispanic heritage.

I don't know, I think some other language groups. Anyway, they had multilingual explanations as to why they wanted people to follow particular rules and harvesting techniques. And they found that by being very proactive and having people, they hired an interpreter who could speak several Asian languages,

that I've been told they feel they're getting above 90% compliance now. And that's really, you know, it's really the education as to why the regulation exists that's so effective and important. Because otherwise if you just say, here's the regulation, people don't understand why it's the regulation, they're less likely to comply. But it's really in the interest of the long-term harvest for everybody.

Switch a little bit. You've been involved with the Native Plant Society.

[00:41:06] Elizabeth Uhlig:
How have you been involved with that?

[00:41:09] Dan Luoma:
I became involved with the Native Plant Society because after I finished at the University of Oregon, I worked for two years for the Bureau of Land Management as a botanist. And that's how I became exposed to the work that the Native Plant Society was doing.

And then just as I was starting graduate school, a group of students in particular in Corvallis wanted to form a chapter of the Native Plant Society. So I was also involved with that effort, getting our chapter started. And it just sort of became part of my life, really. It's a really good, great group of people to work with. You know, they're real dedicated to educating the public about the role of plants in kind of wildland situations. Not just, I mean, almost everybody likes wildflowers and that's part of it. But it's more than just looking at the pretty flowers. It's gaining and communicating an appreciation for plant life in general and its role in sustaining ecosystems. It's been a very satisfying endeavor to that organization grow and prosper.

[00:42:37] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Have you worked with Freeman Rowe in that organization or Rota Love? Or who are some of the people you worked with?

[00:42:43] Dan Luoma:
Rota was probably one of the ones that most influenced me early on in the Native Plant Society and got me active at a statewide level. Because Rota had already had a long history of activism with the organization throughout the state. And I was initially just involved with the Corvallis chapter. But it was, as I remember, at a meeting in Ashland, the first annual meeting of the Native Plant Society that I went to, that Rota kind of cornered me. They were looking for a president for that year and no one had stepped forward. And it was the annual meeting. It was time for the election. And so Frank Lang, who was a professor of botany at Southern Oregon at the time, and Rota, who I believe was teaching here at the time to me. And I believe maybe I was president of the Corvallis chapter at the time. And they said, okay, Frank said, Rota, I'll do it this year if you do it next year.

And Rota said, okay, well, Frank, I'll do it next year. Dan, if you do it after I do it. So I think that was kind of the start of my involvement in the statewide level. And Rota had a great role as my mentor, really, in getting me up to speed about very statewide issues in the Native Plant Society. And let's see, Freeman Rowe actually got me started with working in the Glide Wildflower Show, which is dates from about 1978. Shortly after I was a student here, he was asked to help identify the specimens for what is Oregon's largest and oldest display of native plants. And he asked me to help him. Yeah, 78, 79. Yeah, I think it was 78. And then in 79, he asked me to come back because I was working with the BLM then. And I got time off from my boss, the BLM. He thought that was a good endeavor to go identify plants. So that was my job. And then I believe it was 1980 that Freeman started helping her set up

not Pisco Wildflower Show, so he sort of abandoned me with the Glide Show. But at that same time, the local Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service, I believe, in Roseburg, were starting to hire botanists. So we were able to get a group of people together down there and continue the proper identification of the specimens at the Wildflower Show, which is what the community group that puts it on has always emphasized that the plants would be correctly identified as an educational display.

[00:45:52] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Why in Glide? And why has that become the biggest one in the state?

[00:45:57] Dan Luoma:
Well, I may have to research that a little bit more myself because I may be giving the keynote address, the banquet address for the Native Plant Society's annual meeting this year in Roseburg. And some people asked me if I do that to actually investigate some of the botanical history of Douglas County, which is where Glide is. And I have not done all that research yet, but I do know some of it from working there for so long. And there was a woman who had an interest in wildflowers who lived in Glide, and they had a community association, not a Grange exactly, but something like that. And she organized the first wildflower show there in the early 60s, I believe, mid 60s. And I think I even attended it. I think my mother took me to it. I've never verified that by looking at the logbook that was signed in. Then that grew. The first few years, it was in a Forest Service building,

which was a small little building looking over the North Umpqua River. And it became so popular, I think it was the only wildflower show in Oregon at the time, and one of the few on the West Coast, and it got publicity in Sunset Magazine. And busloads of people started coming in to go to it, and they moved it to the Glide Community Center, and that's where it is to this day. And then there was, it started about the same time the Native Plant Society was formed in Portland. So the Native Plant Society was originally just in, pretty much just in Portland. And the Glide Wildflower Show was in Glide, and eventually the Native Plant Society, people started putting on various wildflower shows throughout the state, and there are a number of them now. But yes, Glide is the oldest and largest, and one of the reasons it's the largest is because the local community volunteers are so incredibly organized,

and they've been doing it so long that they know the logistics and the strategy of bringing it together. Every specimen is vased, it's in a lovely vase, unlike most wildflower shows, where they might be in whatever is handy, a jar or a cup or something. And it's just this incredible week before the show opens to the public. And there's a lot of stuff going on.

[00:48:53] Elizabeth Uhlig:
I imagine you were involved with the Mount Pisgah Mushroom Festival that's in the fall?

[00:48:58] Dan Luoma:
In the fall, yeah. I've been involved with that quite a bit, as much as I could. The fall being my own busy time for research, I've not been as involved with the mushroom show as I might have liked to have been able to be at various times over the years, just because my own work kept me away. But whenever I could, I would bring specimens or help identify or whatnot. And the first year Freeman started giving a prize for special contributions, I happened to bring down from Washington a very, very special mushroom, and he gave it a prize that year.

And is that the... That's that photograph there. The photograph that's in the U of O alumni bulletin.

[00:49:56] Elizabeth Uhlig:
What's so special about that?

[00:49:58] Dan Luoma:
Well, as far as is known, for one thing, it doesn't grow in Oregon, and yet it's extremely aesthetically pleasing to look at. It's very photogenic, it has these golden granules on it, and it kind of glistens in the sunlight, and sort of like everybody who doesn't live where it grows wants to see it in their life, if they're a mushroom, if they have a big interest in mushrooms. Now, in Alaska, it apparently is quite common, but there are probably mushrooms that are relatively common in Oregon that people who live in Alaska would like to see sometime too. So it's one of those biogeographic holy grails that you have to travel somewhere to see it. So it was close enough that I could bring it here to the Mount Pisgah mushroom show so people who never had a chance to see it could see it fresh. Do you go out on special trips just to go hunting, like birders go out watching the birds, and to look for...

Usually, I would say once a year, I take a field trip, usually to a special area. So it's not so much directed to look at a special species, although that may or may not be the case sometimes, but we'll go to a special area. A couple of years ago, I led a field trip to what's called Valley of the Giants natural area near the Dallas, Oregon. No, near Dallas, Oregon, and things like that.

In your career, about 30 years or so,

[00:51:50] Elizabeth Uhlig:
what have been the major changes in botany or mycology in the areas you've studied?

[00:51:59] Dan Luoma:
Tremendous changes in how relationships amongst the various organisms are conceived. So kind of what we would call the phylogenetic underpinnings of relationships have all been scrambled, and maybe that's overstatement. But what that entails then often is changes in the Latin names. So when you're learning Latin names and you're relatively young, it's relatively easy. It's sort of like language in general. It seems to be easier when you're younger. So then you go along 25 or 30 years later, and new research brings about the necessity to change groupings and put things that were thought to be in one family and another family, and they're split things apart that were thought previously to be related, and all the name changes that go with that. That's been exciting to see that new knowledge developed, but at the same time frustrating, because you want to use the correct name, yet at the same time you have a feeling,

well, Freeman taught me that it was thus and such, and why can't it still be that? So that's one of the things that has changed a lot. Another thing that has changed a lot is public awareness of mushrooms. There's a vastly increased interest in them, although that's not too surprising because there was a long ways to go. Thirty years ago or so, a lot more people would have had a disdainful view of mushrooms, toadstools, poison, ick, nasty, wouldn't want to have anything to do with that, and now there's a much broader interest in mushrooms as being something good to eat or good for the forest or good for wildlife, something like that.

What then is the current focus of your research, or maybe you've talked about this,

[00:54:14] Elizabeth Uhlig:
what areas are you looking to move into now?

[00:54:18] Dan Luoma:
Well, there's a number of things I'd like to do if I have the opportunity to continue some of this bridging the basic and applied science, and in one case I'm trying to see what the effects are of planting seedlings in a forestry situation that have been inoculated with truffle fungi, say, versus those that haven't been, versus some that have a variety of locally collected fungi as spores, inoculated as spores onto the roots. There's some basic biodiversity concerns in the soil ecosystem, and there's interest from forest managers as to whether or not they can grow trees faster by the presence of the fungi being on the roots. Another thing would be continuing educational efforts through the Siskiyou Field Institute, for instance, getting the public younger generations aware of what I like to call the living soil in general. The soil ecosystem is complex, very difficult to study,

and an analogy I like to use with students is that when you're walking through the forest, you might think of yourself as walking on the backs of whales in terms of the biomass of some of the organisms that might be in the soil. So again, yeah, soil ecosystem issues are a big place I'd like to go. And then, as I said, with my long-term interest in biogeography, having the opportunity to do more basic studies of the biota and the Siskiyous would be a really interesting thing. You were chosen one of the distinguished alumni at Lane here

[00:56:23] Elizabeth Uhlig:
as part of the 40th anniversary celebration. What does that meant to you?

[00:56:27] Dan Luoma:
Well, to me, it was for a great honor and really was affirming of the efforts I've made in my career, educationally and scientifically. So that part of it was very personally satisfying. But I also thought of it as being symbolic of, I guess you might say, the success of Lane Community College and all the people that have benefited from going through the system. Because really, in my case, you can never do a scientific test, what if something else had been, because what happened happened. But in my case, it was just a seminal event to come here and interact with the people I did and get going on a career that was very satisfying personally and I would hope to the larger society. So I also look on it as being symbolic of the success of lots of people.

[00:57:40] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Final question, what do you think has been your most important contributions to your field?

[00:57:48] Dan Luoma:
Well, that's a tough one. Let's see. I thought about it quite that way.

Probably early on in my dissertation, a big take home message out of that was a finding that the truffle fungi were on the one hand behaving similarly to the above ground plants in that the groups that grew together changed as you went from a white forest to a dry forest, for instance. And yet at the same time, and looking back on it, I think now it's not too surprising that probably the fungi are more sensitive to what we call this moisture gradient and soil ecosystems because they are living in the soil, so they're intimately connected with soil at all times. So that was one of my findings that they seem to group out in a way that was more sensitive to soil conditions than the above ground plants.

[00:58:59] Elizabeth Uhlig:
What are some other things? Oh, some work that I've done with

[00:59:04] Dan Luoma:
what are called monotropa plants and their relatives, things like Indian pipe or snow plant. So I was able to provide some information on their ecology, and we now know that those plants are themselves nourished by fungi in the soil directly. And so they're providing an indicator, again, of the below ground ecosystem. So that, to me, it sounds like what I'm saying is that my contributions have been towards bringing to light knowledge of this hidden below ground ecosystem. That's kind of a way to put it a little nutshell.

Are there other areas I should have asked you about,

[00:59:57] Elizabeth Uhlig:
or things you would like to add to the discussion?

[01:00:04] Dan Luoma:
Well, let's see. They wanted me to say, Hi, Mom, on the video, but that wouldn't work so well.

Certainly the support of one's parents is always important, spouses, children, what have you, all the people around you that encourage.

This is take two of the Dan Woma oral history. I've tried to bring the enthusiasm that Freeman brought to education when I give field classes or any kind of outdoor situation. I don't think I could ever duplicate Freeman's high energy enthusiasm. That's not my style, but I do try to bring about the spirit of the way he let the students know that he valued their participation in the learning process. Again, this gets back to what I see the importance of field-based learning. That's an opportunity to do that in the real world and communicate in ways that are very much more difficult in the lecture situation and teaching from a textbook.

[01:01:32] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Would you say a few things about some other mentors that have influenced your career?

[01:01:37] Dan Luoma:
Well, at the University of Oregon, there was Dave Wagner, who was also honored through the Mount Pisgah Arboretum celebration. He was really the one who, perhaps most of all, encouraged me to consider graduate school, because really I had gone into studying plant geography, as it were, and any way to visualize going beyond that. I remember I think my parents were a little concerned, well, okay, you get this degree in geography, then you're going to get a job or what? It really was Dave Wagner who, when I was taking his botany class, encouraged me to think about grad school. I think he may also have put me into contact with the Bureau of Land Management and their jobs for botanists. He was a botanical mentor and a kind of practical mentor in that way. In the geography department at the University of Oregon,

Carl Johanelson was my advisor and he was a biogeographer and a tremendously challenging intellect, you might say. Yet we got along great because he respected the training. I got it laying, for instance. He knew that I had a good background in biology. I think as a biogeographer teaching a lot of geography students who probably didn't have background in biology, he appreciated that interaction I was able to have with him. He's also a regular attender of the Mount Pisgah events. Then moving on to Oregon State, my major professor was Bob Frankel, another biogeographer and wetlands ecologist specialist, a tremendous scholar of plant ecology. I just learned tremendous amounts from him and he was able to advise me as to what classes to take, papers to read, things like that. Perhaps my foremost mycological mentor was Jim Trappie, but also Bill Dennison at Oregon State and then at the University of Oregon,

George Carroll taught me introductory mycology, senior level.

Jim Trappie is North America's foremost truffle expert and while I was a graduate student, elected president of the Mycological Society of America. It was really through his mentoring that I was able to start making these various international contacts and develop an ability to work in the international arena. That was probably the main mentors.

[01:04:59] Elizabeth Uhlig:
What about the next generation? Who will be mentoring them?

[01:05:05] Dan Luoma:
I've had some students and one of them is now working in Canada, Canadian citizen, in various forestry issues, conservation oriented. Another one is in Mississippi working in wildlife. She did what's called a small mammal mycophagy study where you study the small mammals eating truffles, which ones they eat and how much, that sort of thing. She's working with the wildlife biology department at Mississippi State University.

[01:05:41] Elizabeth Uhlig:
What is her name?

[01:05:44] Dan Luoma:
Kathy Jacobs. First student was Chris Stockdale. Then Aurelia Kolakowski is my current student and she lives here in Eugene because her husband is in a PhD program at the University of Oregon. It turns out his PhD work involves computer analysis of these DNA fingerprints and what they mean in these interrelationship studies. That's very interesting that his research is so closely allied to the interests that we have also. Aurelia's research is looking at the roots and bioces themselves. She's been able to use the DNA fingerprinting technology in her thesis work to explore which fungi are on the roots and how many in which places and that sort of thing.

[01:06:41] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Is there anything else you'd like to add?

[01:06:43] Dan Luoma:
I guess not at this point. Thank you very much.

[01:06:48] Elizabeth Uhlig:
You're welcome, my pleasure.