Oregon State University’s College of Forestry and Extension Service teamed up to create the Oregon Wood Innovation Center (OWIC). OWIC’s mission is to improve the competitiveness of Oregon’s wood products industry by fostering innovation in products, processes, and business systems. A key function of the Center is to serve as the primary link between university research and needs and opportunities in the forest industry.

Our goal is to create sustainable and resilient natural systems in which people engage with the Earth with reciprocity. Indigenous peoples have stewarded natural resources for millennia through their knowledge and traditional practices. The TEK Lab explores, facilitates, and honors the synergies between TEK, Western science, and other ways of knowing.

The Mechanized Harvesting Laboratory combines state-of-the-art computer-based forest harvesting machine simulation, mechanical analysis, operations research, and field-based research to increase the knowledge of modern mechanized harvesting systems. Our vision is to provide transformative research that supports technology-based experiential learning for modern forest harvesting systems.

This laboratory conducts field, lab and modeling research on the impact of natural disturbance and land use on forest hydrology, water quality and aquatic ecosystem health and the hillslope stream reach and small catchment scale. 

This research is lead by John Bailey, the Maybelle Clarke MacDonald Professor of Teaching Excellence in Silviculture and Fire Management. His research focuses on using traditional and experimental silviculture practices to achieve a spectrum of objectives in a landscape, including commodity production, habitat creation, fire risk reduction and ecosystem restoration.

The Aerial Information Systems laboratory is investigating a wide range of lightweight sensors for UAV application on both fixed wing and helicopters to support forest management, forest engineering, forest protection, wildlife habitat and search and rescue operations.

This research focuses on three major areas and seeks to develop or extend: imputation methods that support dynamic forest inventory, silvicultural planning, and habitat analysis; sampling and statistical methods to characterize and quantify status and change of selected attributes including biomass and carbon and applications of lidar to forest measurements and assessments. 

Forest Business Solutions is a research team in OSU's Department of Wood Science & Engineering. As a group, our mission is to develop professionals in forest products marketing and business and to facilitate forest industry competitiveness through education and research. Our vision is to be the leading forest business program in North America as perceived by both peers and industry managers.