MDC honors Daniel Dey as a Master Conservationist

COLUMBIA, Mo. – The Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC) and the Missouri Conservation Commission recently honored Daniel Dey of New Bloomfield with the Department’s Master Conservationist Award for his lifetime commitment to forestry and conservation. The special presentation followed the Commission’s Dec. 12 open meeting at MDC headquarters in Jefferson City.

The MDC Master Conservationist Award was created in 1941 to honor living or deceased citizen conservationists, former commissioners of the Department, and employees of conservation-related agencies, universities, or organizations who have made substantial and lasting contributions to the fisheries, forestry, or wildlife resources, including conservation law enforcement and conservation education-related activities in the state. Learn more at mdc.mo.gov/about-us/awards-honors/master-conservationist-award-nomination

Dey has been a leader in forestry research and teaching for more than 30 years with a focus on improving the productivity, diversity, health, value, and sustainability of forests in Missouri and beyond. 

He has spent most of his career in Missouri, including two early years as the MDC forest research supervisor followed by 26 years with the USDA Forest Service where he has been promoted to positions of progressively greater responsibility, scope, and stature. These include research forester, research project leader, assistant director of research, and most recently as a "super scientist," the highest rank that can be earned by a scientist in the USDA Forest Service. 

Dey’s research, outreach, and education efforts include providing forestry-research leadership for MDC’s Missouri Ozark Forest Ecosystem Project. The project is a comprehensive, landscape-scale experiment measuring the effects of forest disturbance on wood, water, wildlife, health and sustainability of Ozark forests. 

Dey was also involved in restoring mixed oak-pine forest habitats to increase landscape-scale animal diversity with emphasis on restoration of the brown-headed nuthatch in southern Missouri.

Dey’s research includes advancing understanding of white-oak health and productivity with special emphasis on sustainability of Missouri’s white oak resource for manufacturing oak barrels sold globally. Oak cooperage production is important in creating employment and investment opportunities in rural Missouri communities and throughout the Midwest and Midsouth.

Dey was key in developing a state-wide shared stewardship agreement among state and federal agencies to create opportunities for collaboration on landscape-scale activities to address forest health, diversity, productivity, sustainability, and rural employment.

Dey coauthored the 600-page textbook, "The Ecology and Silviculture of Oaks,” considered the definitive text on oak ecology and silviculture in the country. Dey has also published more than 300 scientific and technical papers on forestry, silviculture, ecology, and related subjects and made more than 400 presentations to share research findings and forest management recommendations.

Through the course of his career, Dey has received acknowledgements for his scientific accomplishments and his service to the forestry profession, including the Karkhagne Award from the Missouri Chapter of the Society of American Foresters and lifetime recognition as a Fellow in the Society of American Foresters. 

“Thanks to his decades of research, outreach, and education in the fields of forestry and conservation, Dr. Daniel Dey is an excellent example of a Master Conservationist Award recipient,” said MDC Director Jason Sumners. “The relevance and broad geographic scope of his research, his outgoing personality, his communication skills, and his decades of work have resulted in Dan being very well known, very well respected, and embraced by Missouri's forestry community.”