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The Honorable Antoni Macierewicz, one of Poland’s most renowned members of Parliament, visits Warnell

June 7, 2013

The Warnell School received a rare visit from an exciting guest recently:  a member of Poland’s parliament and one of the most renowned Polish politicians. The Honorable Antoni Macierewicz, former secretary of interior and former deputy minister for national defense in Poland, visited UGA Athens Campus on May 16, 2013, to thank a group of Warnell professors for conducting a recent study of wood samples relative to a tree that played a controversial role in the tragic crash of Polish Air Force One Tu-154 near Smolensk, Russia, on April 10, 2010.

Macierewicz is the chairman of the Parliamentary Committee investigating the Smolensk Catastrophe whose objective is to investigate the airplane crash that killed 96 people, including Poland’s President Lech Kaczynski, 10 generals (including five top NATO military leaders), high-ranking government officials, members of the Polish parliament and clergy, as well as a number of civilians (including one U.S. citizen). The congressman gave a talk about the challenges associated with the investigation, including:

• Conducting inter-disciplinary research within an international arena that is subjected to volatile relations with experts in diverse fields of specialization, who are scattered throughout the world in different time zones;
• Dealing with governments of various countries with their own independent laws, procedures and frequently conflicting objectives, and;
• Synergizing the research with other relevant studies of various independent scientists, such as the study from Warnell.

The Warnell team’s study proved to be very helpful in the large investigation led by the Polish Congressional Committee, Macierewicz said during his visit. The crash has been the source of significant uproar in Poland and a focal point for different interdisciplinary studies in the U.S., Canada, Australia and other countries in Europe and elsewhere. Criticisms have focused predominantly on the official findings that blamed human error and on the hasty manner in which the investigation was conducted by both Russian and Polish officials. Among skeptics of the official findings, one source of debate has been about a birch tree blamed for cutting off a third of the 80-ton plane wing, allegedly causing it to crash. This theory has been refuted by comprehensive simulation studies of the event developed by Professor Wieslaw Binienda at the University of Akron. However, without knowledge of the actual wood parameters for the specific subject tree, the study lacked full appeal in the eyes of the public and was vividly criticized on these grounds by the media.

The Warnell study was conducted by a team led by Dr. Chris Cieszewski, a professor of fiber supply assessment and an expert in forest biometrics. The team included (alphabetically): Drs. Finto Antony (forest biometrics and wood quality), Pete Bettinger (operations research and remote sensing), Joseph Dahlen (wood quality), Roger Lowe (geographic information systems), and Mike Strub (statistics and quantitative silviculture, retired Weyerhaeuser biometrician and adjunct professor at Warnell and the University of Tennessee).

The team focused on the technical aspects of the wood quality parameters of the subject tree, which was analyzed using near-infrared spectroscopy and SilviScan X-ray diffraction technology, mathematical modeling, analysis of growth conditions and density impact on wood properties. They also studied sampling-related issues of photo-measurements, estimating various other characteristics such as the impact of proportions of whorls in the tree trunk on the wood structural properties. The analyzed materials included a wood sample from a branch of the subject tree and wood samples from other comparable trees.

Cieszewski said it came as a surprise that the results of this effort proved to be useful for the Congressional Committee scientists associated with the investigation that seeks to explain the circumstances of the crash. “I didn’t think that anyone would actually use the results of our study in Poland when I was invited by Professor Piort Witakowski, chairman of the ‘Smolensk Conference,’ who has never been involved with the Congressional Committee, to analyze the only existing wood sample outside of Russia from the controversial collision tree and to present a paper about it at the international multidisciplinary conference,” Cieszewski said. “In the end, it is very gratifying that our research proved to be useful to the committee investigating the crash.”

“I pursued the problem because it contained a couple of interesting aspects relevant to our programs,” Cieszewski explained further. “First, the mathematical modeling of tree stem wood density from a branch sample has a potential for saving costs in forest sampling related to wood quality research, which was pointed out in the literature before but has never been quite figured out yet. Second, photo-sampling has been gaining increasing international interest while it relates to some of our graduate work in the fiber supply assessment former research, which potentially could be a worthwhile addition even to the FIA sampling in the USA. Shortly after undertaking this research, and after a few discussions on related subjects, the Smolensk Conference’s Organizing Committee invited me to present a second paper on another fiber supply assessment-related problem of satellite imagery-based land change tracking analysis, and to join the conference Organizing Committee.”

Cieszewski presented the research findings at the international conference of 2012, organized by more than 100 professors from different universities, and the Warnell team published the results in two peer-reviewed articles.

Macierewicz was welcomed at UGA with the true Southern Hospitality. He was greeted before the seminar by J. Griffin Doyle, vice president for government relations, and by Dr.  Cieszewski, who also gave the introduction to this event. After his seminar, the Congressman was presented with UGA gifts from Tom S. Landrum, senior vice president for external affairs, and from Robert H. Derrick, with the UGA Office of International Education, and with Warnell gifts on behalf of Dean Mike Clutter, who sponsored this event. Macierewicz also met with authors of the previously explained research, who he thanked individually for the study, then met with a number of Warnell faculty members and students. He then toured the school, including Warnell’s wood quality lab where part of the analysis was conducted.

http://www.warnell.uga.edu/news/index.php/2013/06/the-honorable-antoni-macierewicz-one-of-polands-most-renowned-members-of-parliament-visits-warnell/