Jane Claire Dirks-Edmunds
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Jane Claire Dirks-Edmunds (Born June 9, 1912 in Arkansas) was an American ecologist, biologist and author of Not Just Trees. Notable for her study of the Sattleback Mountain research site from 1938-19__
Early Life
Dirks was born in the Ozarks of Arkansas in 1912, the youngest of ten children. Her parents, Linda Gates and Peter B. Dirks traveled in 1924 to Puget Sound, Washington State, finally settling in Umpqua Valley. In the prologue of her book Not Just Trees: The Legacy of a Douglas-fir Forest, she notes an early love of the Northwest’s forests; this admiration carried her through her academic years. Dr. Dirks-Edmunds attended Linfield College from 1932-1937, where she received her B.S. in Biology.
Professional Career
After earning her PhD. at the University of Illinois, Dr. Dirks-Edmunds returned to Linfield College as an instructor of Biology and assistant to the registrar; she was the first female PhD hired by the institution. In 1944, she took a brief leave of absence from Linfield and spent three semesters at Whitworth College, serving as the head of the Biology department. She returned to Linfield in 1946 and taught a diverse course load until her retirement in 1974 as Professor Emerita. Dr. Jane Claire Dirks-Edmunds traveled to study other biotic communities: the Sonoran Desert, in 1967 and later in 1972, and a brief sojurn to Lake Atilan and Guatemala's tropical forest.
Saddleback Research Site
This mountain in Oregon state, Lincoln County (commonly confused with the Saddle Mountain of Astoria.[1]) was a project of Dr. Macnab, Dirks-Edmunds' mentor at Linfield. This hectare plot lay in the Coastal Mountain range. They studied the numerous organisms that lived and thrived in the rich soil of the Douglas-fir and Hemlock community, with Dr. Dirks-Edmunds taking charge of the site after Dr. Macnab retired from field research.
Sadly, as the entire region was being encroached by logging throughout the 1900s, eventually Dr. Dirks-Edmunds traveled to the research site to find that her life's work had been logged for a second time. The area never recovered as an active mature forest, and was subject to fires afterward.
Authorship
Her doctoral Thesis, "A Comparison of the Biotic Communities of the Cedar-Hemlock and Oak-Hickory Associations," was published in Ecological Monographs for July, 1947. The doctorate afforded her the honor of being one of the first women graduates of Linfield College to hold that degree.
Following the death of her husband in 1983, Dirks-Edmunds revisited her Saddleback Mountain research and began to write Not Just Trees. She visited her old research site on the mountain for the first time in ten years and found her forest entirely clear cut, her life’s project ruined. Not Just Trees was published in 1999 and is an important text for the Northwest because it allows a glimpse into an ecological community of Saddleback that was forever destroyed.
An active member in the community of the First Baptist of McMinnville, she published a 125-year history, entitled Roots, Visions and Mission, published in 1992 at the request of the church's anniversary committee. She was also a contributor of short essays, poems, scientific papers and lectures.
References
- Not Just Trees