President Appoints UA Tree-Ring Lab Director to Valles Caldera Trust

Lori Stiles
Dec. 12, 2000


President Clinton announced today that he will appoint Thomas W. Swetnam to serve as member of the Valles Caldera Trust.

Swetnam, of Tucson, Ariz., is currently director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research and professor of dendrochronology and watershed management at the University of Arizona.

The Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico was created this year when Congress passed the Valles Caldera Preservation Act (Senate bill 1892.) The act was signed into law on July 25, 2000. It authorized the federal government to acquire and preserve the 95,000-acre Baca Ranch, which comprises most of the Valles Caldera, a volcanic bowl of green valleys in northern New Mexico.

The area constitutes "a unique land mass, with significant scientific, cultural, historic, recreational, ecological, wildlife, fisheries and productive values," the act states. The land originally was granted to the heirs of Don Luis Maria Cabeza de Vaca in 1860.

"This will be an experiment in land management because the intent is to manage this National Park-quality land in an economically self-sufficient way," Swetnam said. "The experiment is to see over the next 15 years if more local control and a board managing the different resources can both preserve the landscape and be financially self-supporting," he said.

The Sante Fe National Forest supervisor and Bandelier National Monument superintendent join Swetnam and six other experts on the board. The nine members are appointed to 2- and 4-year terms.

Swetnam was born in New Mexico and he grew up in the village of Jemez Springs, which is located near the Valles Caldera. In the 1970s, Swetnam worked as a park technician at Grand Canyon National Park, and later as forestry technician in the Gila Wilderness of southern New Mexico.

Swetnam joined the UA Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research in 1980. He has served on the editorial boards of several scientific journals, including the International Journal of Wildland Fire, the Canadian Journal of Forest Research, and Ecological Applications. He has written and co-authored more than 70 scientific articles, book chapters, technical reports and commentaries.

Swetnam is an active member of the Ecological Society of America, the Society of American Foresters, the American Geophysical Union, and the Tree-Ring Society.

The full text of the Valles Caldera Preservation Act is on the web at http://www.fs.fed.us/r3/sfe/valles/act.html

More information about Swetnam can be found on the web at http://tree.ltrr.arizona.edu/~tswetnam/

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