Cool Technologies

Cool New Tool for Coloradans: Recreation Impact Monitoring System

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If there were a The Smokey Wire Fix Not Fight Timely Innovation Award, this effort by the Colorado Mountain Club would be a winner. We’ve been talking about keeping track of recreation impacts and here is a way for volunteers to provide information, and also for volunteers to help fix the problems. I’m sure others have been frustrated by wanting to report something on a trail and not having the time to figure out which District you’re on, or want to call around to find the Recreation staff. And if it’s that hard for retirees, it must be more difficult for others.

Below is some information about the RIMS app and here’s a link to an overview pdf. Here’s the website where you can take a training video and learn to use the app.

Features
• Geo-located point data
• Drop-down surveys & objective metrics
• Photos
• Online maps & functionality
• Cloud sync for real-time data

Users
• Agency Staff
• Stewardship Organizations
• Trained Volunteers
• Enabled for Android or Apple devices
• Simple & Easy to Use!

Accessibility
• Trail, Campsite, Sign, Facility & Visitor Use
Assessments
• No Cost for data collection
• Custom Assessment Development (invasive species,
wildlife monitoring, etc.)

The CMC folks worked with agency staff to develop it, and here’s how agency staff and volunteers can use it:

There are a few ways both agencies and stewardship groups can access the data –

· All assessments are viewable through the RIMS app itself and users (including agency staff) can filter the data by assessment type and date. We are adding a new “sharing” function in the next month which will allow a user to send the details of an assessment directly via email.

· The webviewer is a browser-based tool that displays assessments on a map an allows for some additional filtering.

· Finally, our customized reporting dashboards are available for land managers or stewardship groups this spring and include geographically filtered data (e.g. only assessment within a Forest Service Ranger District’s boundaries) as well as charts, graphs, maps, and full data exporting capabilities. The dashboards can also generate automatic email notifications on a daily/weekly/monthly basis to help direct rapid response stewardship work. For example, a trail crew leader might want a weekly report of all the new downed trees that have been reported on the district to help inform where to direct staff or volunteer efforts.

The workflow for resolving issues is as follows: App users can re-assess any survey in the RIMS app to update the current conditions at that location. For example, if a downed tree is reported June 1 and a volunteer hikes that same trail June 7 to remove the downed tree, they can re-assess the first survey, remove the record of the downed tree and the issue will be marked as resolved within the app database. If for some reason the volunteer does not use the app to report the work they completed, another user could hike the same trail at any point after that and re-assess the original survey to mark it as resolved. The re-assessments are also helpful for measuring change over time: for example, re-assessing a dispersed camping area year after year to measure growth of the site, increased vegetation damage, etc.

We are still working through some details of this workflow but the ideal scenario in the future is that we have enough folks using RIMS and re-assessing issues that we always have a relatively current view of current conditions on the ground.

Here’s a link to a report from Chaffee County from July to November. My pet peeve that this could help with are dispersed campers that don’t respect the two week camping ban, or leave their trailers in a spot for what appears to be all of hunting season, taking up the choicest spots and not actually being there.

The image above is from the Chaffee County report. The CMC folks’ intention is to ultimately go national, so please spread the word in your area!

New Technology Grants: 79 Mill from DOE, Including Improving Wood Heating

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What NOT to do in fire country.

 

Whatever the  color of the Administration, the relatively obscure  wheels of scientific research and development continue along well-worn paths (whether the wording of the day is “low carbon” or “affordable, reliable and secure”). As I recall from my time in R&D, scientists readily change the title, and perhaps some introductory paragraphs, and voila! Thanks to the Forest Business Network for this link.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is providing up to $79 million in funding for bioenergy research and development including biofuels, bioproducts, and biopower. This funding supports DOE’s goal of providing consumers and businesses with a range of domestic energy options that are affordable, reliable, and secure.

Topics areas for the biofuel funding opportunity include the following:

  • Cultivation Intensification Processes for Algae: Develop technologies for outdoor algae systems that increase the harvest yield, reliability and quality of algae.
  • Biomass Component Variability and Feedstock Conversion Interface: Research to lower the cost and improve the reliability of biomass handling and preprocessing.
  • Efficient Wood Heaters: Develop technologies to reduce emissions and increase efficiency of wood heaters for residential heating.
  • Systems Research of Hydrocarbon Biofuel Technologies: Integrate new technologies and processes in experimental prototype systems to improve and verify real-world performance and lower the cost of drop-in biofuels.
  • Optimization of Biomass-Derived Jet Fuel Blends: Identify and develop cost-competitive drop-in renewable jet fuel with improved energy density and lower particulate matter emissions.
  • Renewable Energy from Urban and Suburban Wastes: Support academic research and educational programs that focus on strategies to produce bioenergy and bioproducts from urban and suburban waste feedstocks.
  • Advanced Bioprocessing and Agile BioFoundry: Reduce the time and cost of developing biological processes for biomanufacturing fuels and products through the use of synthetic biology, low capital intensity methods, and continuous production systems.
  • Plastics in the Circular Carbon Economy: Develop biobased plastics with improved performance and recyclability and lower the cost and energy-intensity of recycling  existing plastics through enhanced degradation.
  • Rethinking Anaerobic Digestion: Develop anaerobic processes or alternative strategies to enhance carbon conversion efficiency and lower costs of smaller scale wet waste systems.
  • Reducing Water, Energy, and Emissions in Bioenergy: Identify biofuels or bioproducts technologies with the greatest potential for reducing water consumption, energy consumption, and/or emissions relative to existing conventional fuels or products.

This FOA also supports the Water Security Grand Challenge, a White House initiated, DOE-led framework to advance transformational technology and innovation to meet the global need for safe, secure, and affordable water. In particular, this funding will support research and development focused on anaerobic digestion, a technology that can help achieve the Grand Challenge’s goal to double resource recovery from municipal wastewater.

 

I particularly like the “wood heaters” project because there are many low-income people already use this as a primary heating source. New cool technologies are cool, of course, but making old uncool but widely used wood heat work better is also important.

Sign of the Times?

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Funny seeing an “8 in 1 Survival Kit” advertisement on a ‘climate warrior’ gloom and doom website. The advertiser specializes in “Outdoor and Urban Survival”. A list of what is in there makes me laugh.

1) LED flashlight (No mention of batteries) In a climate emergency, batteries will always be available, eh?
2) Heavy Duty ink pen (In case you need to sign another useless petition?)
3) Flint Stick (For lighting abandoned campfires? 84% of wildfires in the US are human-caused)
4) Compass with ruler (Without a map, that severely limits how much a compass can help you. Magnetic declination? In Seattle, True North and Magnetic North are different by over 20 degrees)
5) High frequency whistle (When the shit hits the fan, just whistle!)
6) Tool Card (Yeah, fix your Prius with THAT!)
7) Steel Striker with ruler and bottle opener (Almost a dozen uses when Civil War starts!)

Enjoy Your Sunday and cherish what we continue to have!

Citizen forest planners using GIS

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This seems like a strange source for hearing about evolution in forest planning policy, but here is what the Region 6 regional forester is telling the world.  It’s not something I remember serious discussion about when the 2012 Rule was developed, nor have I heard of it being done anywhere.  Has anyone participated in something like this in forest planning?  (I’ve added the bold type.)

Connoughton: Public policy for each national forest is set by law. The national forest plan follows the procedures of the National Environment Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and a few other pieces of legislation. The advantage of collaborating on a GIS platform is that people have data, tools, and maps that give them greater insight, and they can ask design questions. On the platform, you are in a spatial environment that allows you to display the problem, query one another’s ideas, and look at the logical outcome. This type of dialog becomes a mechanism for designing alternatives. Instead of forest service specialists putting together alternatives that are mandatory under the National Environmental Policy Act, they could collaboratively engage in setting public policy and ask design questions.

Boy, what an advance that is. Otherwise, we are drawing public policy from inside the government and the outcome does not capture people’s interest. Why not turn the ability to design public policy over to them. The foundation of policy is spatial. Its design is largely supported by sets of spatial information. This is very liberating to people who otherwise have had to depend on the government to create the forest plan.

Turning forest information over to people in a way they can understand is empowering. The responsibility of government is to be faithful and trusting to the people. The people then use tools for designing alternative solutions and public policies.

National Forest map app now available for Android, iOS devices

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nfmap

Thanks to Bob Berwyn’s blog for this one.. here is the link and below is an excerpt:

“This mobile app makes it easier than ever to plan your visit to a national forest or grassland,” U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell said in a press release. “By putting important forest information right at your fingertips, it will encourage more Americans to get outside and explore their forests.”

The PDF Maps Mobile App, developed by Avenza Systems Inc., is available as a free download from iTunes and the Android Play Store. The app provides access to Forest Service maps, such as motor-vehicle-use maps, which are free while pages from national forest atlases are 99 cents and forest visitor maps are $4.99. Prices are pending for other agency maps.

The maps are geo-referenced with the user’s location appearing as a blue dot. The app works on iPhones (3GS or newer) and iPads with WiFi+3G. It also works with Android 4 or newer operating systems on devices with at least 1 gigabyte of memory.

The digital maps are part of USDA’s work toward reaching President Obama’s initiative to create a paperless government. Online customer surveys also showed a desire for more online products and information. The Forest Service is currently working on the first phase of a website redesign, expected to debut early in 2014, which centers on a map-based tool for planning trips onto our nation’s forests, grasslands and other special places.

MLB, U.S. Forest Service decreases bat shatter rate

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Summertime brings to mind more than wildfires…

Here’s a link… below is an excerpt.

As the 2013 Major League Baseball (MLB) season slides into the All-Star break, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced the results of innovative research by the U.S. Forest Service, and funded by MLB, that will result in significantly fewer shattered baseball bats.

“This innovative research by the U.S. Forest Service will make baseball games safer for players and fans across the nation,” said Secretary Vilsack. “The U.S. Forest Products Laboratory has once again demonstrated that we can improve uses for wood products across our nation in practical ways – making advancements that can improve quality of life and grow our economy.”

Testing and analyzing thousands of shattered Major League bats, U.S. Forest Service researchers at the Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) developed changes in manufacturing that decreased the rate of shattered maple bats by more than 50 percent since 2008. While the popularity of maple bats is greater today than ever before, the number of shattered bats continues to decline.

“Since 2008, the U.S. Forest Service has worked with Major League Baseball to help make America’s pastime safer,” said U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell. “I’m proud that our collective ‘wood grain trust’ has made recommendations resulting in a significant drop in shattered bats, making the game safer for players as well as for fans.”

“These results would not have been possible without the outstanding work of the Forest Products Laboratory and the tireless efforts of its project coordinator, David Kretschmann,” says Daniel Halem, MLB’s Senior Vice President of Labor Relations. “Major League Baseball greatly appreciates the invaluable contributions of the Forest Products Laboratory and Mr. Kretschmann on this important issue.”

Wood is key ingredient in cheap rechargeable battery

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From tree to battery (Image: Dr Jeremy Burgess/Science Photo Library)
From tree to battery (Image: Dr Jeremy Burgess/Science Photo Library)

We have been talking about uses of wood… there are some on the research horizon of interest.

Here’s an article from New Scientist.

A battery made from wood doesn’t exactly scream high-tech innovation – more like something cooked up round the campfire. But a device that exploits wood fibre could be the key to cheap, renewable power.

Lithium-based rechargeable batteries are too expensive to use on a large scale because there is so little lithium available. But sodium is abundant and cheap, so why not base a battery on a sodium electrolyte?

The problem is that sodium ions are many times larger than lithium ones, and they gradually damage a battery’s anode as they diffuse during charging and discharging. Another issue is that using a tin anode in such batteries would offer the highest power storage capacity, but this leads to the formation of a sodium-tin alloy that makes the battery swell, hastening what is known as “structural pulverisation”. The upshot is that a sodium-ion battery with a tin anode can only be charged and discharged around 20 times.

To get around this, Hongli Zhu and colleagues at the University of Maryland in College Park turned to a natural material they knew could more easily carry large ions: soft, porous wood fibre. These fibres include hollow elongated cells called tracheids, which have walls made of a tough material called lignin and which transport water and mineral salts around the organism.
Tin on wood

By depositing a 50-nanometre-thick layer of tin on 2500-nanometre-thick wood fibres, the researchers were able to create an anode that could be charged and discharged 400 times.

The relatively soft nature of the wood fibres effectively releases the mechanical stresses that would pulverise an ordinary tin anode, the team says, resulting in “unprecedented performance for a tin-anode sodium-ion battery”. And because wood fibre is easy to process, it should be possible to use it in the manufacture of low-cost batteries.

The team now wants to engineer bigger batteries for use in renewable storage applications.

Bingan Chen, a researcher specialising in novel battery materials at the University of Cambridge, UK, is impressed. “Using wood fibre as a substrate to lower their cost of sodium-ion batteries is a great, innovative idea,” he says. “But their challenge will be working out how to scale up the manufacturing process to make it commercially viable.”

Colorado: Green Industries With Wood

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ecoSponge_icon

Meanwhile, while Montanans and Oregonians seem to be ambivalent about the industries they have, entrepreneurial Coloradans are still working on getting an industry so as to avoid burning dead lodgepole in piles.

Check out this story in the business section of the Denver Post.

Mark Mathis was looking pretty smart in early 2008.

He was harvesting Colorado beetle-kill and converting the state’s flood of dead trees into pellets for affordable home heating. Then the price of oil collapsed — falling by more than $100 a barrel in a year — and suddenly, pellets were no longer the inexpensive option for heat. Mild winters further eroded pellet demand, and Mathis’ once-boundless plan withered along with the entire biomass and alternative-energy industries.

Five years later, Mathis’ Kremmling-based Confluence Energy is surging with a new mission.

“We are taking on kitty litter,” he said.

Mathis is doubling down on his plan to capitalize on environmental concerns, this time with a
biodegradable beetle-kill product that cleans up oil, gas and solvent spills better and cheaper than the widely used clay-based products, such as cat litter. The company’s Eco-Sponge is becoming popular with oil and gas operations across the country, and strong sales — already passing the company’s heating pellets — have enabled Confluence to acquire its competitor, Rocky Mountain Pellets in Walden, doubling its capacity and making Confluence the largest pellet maker in the West.

Mathis’ Eco-Sponge aims to end the reign of clay-based absorbents in environmental cleanup work with its simplicity. Where those clay bits need to be removed once they absorb oil, gas or benzene spills, Eco-Sponge’s patented army of microorganisms consume the hydrocarbons and can be left on site as an inert material.

Mathis calls it “a composting process on steroids.”

“How often in life do you get to offer solutions for cleaning up an environmental mess like the pine beetle while making a renewable energy source and cleaning up another environmental issue? And make money doing it?” said Mathis over the din of the Walden plant’s maze of pellet-making machines.

CSTPR Noontime Seminar: The Human Dimensions of Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles in Boulder

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I will be in the air, so can’t see this.. a bit off our usual topics but related, and sounded very interesting…
Here’s the link. It’s at 12 MT.

Abstract: This research explores the effect of feedback from the smart grid, smart plugs, and dashboard displays on driving, vehicle charging, and household energy-use behaviors. Toyota Motor Sales, Inc., sponsored the study and provided the University of Colorado with 28 plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHVs) for a 2-year field-test in a smart-grid environment. In Boulder, Colorado, 23,000 households have smart meters; a stratified random sample of 142 of households volunteering for the smart-grid drove 2010 Prius PHVs for 9-week field tests. The utility partnered with the study by installing smart plugs in participant garages. Toyota’s interest was exploring the effects of real-world driving on PHV performance in extreme climatic conditions at high altitudes with mountainous terrain in a smart-grid environment. The utility’s interest was the potential impacts of PHV charging on the electricity grid. Using households and drivers as units of analysis, the University’s investigation addresses a range of topics, including the role of three types of feedback on driving and charging behavior: (1) the utility’s web portal that provided data on overall household electricity usage in 15-minute increments 15 minutes ago; (2) a garage smart plug that provided real-time data in 5-minute increments on a web portal, indicating timing, electricity usage, and frequency of vehicle charging; and (3) the vehicle’s dashboard displays which provided real-time feedback on mpg and on whether the vehicle is in battery-only or hybrid mode, among other information.
In addition to interview and questionnaire data, high-resolution data were collected from 27 vehicles and smart plugs for a period of about 1.5 years. Charging behavior and management are examined from various angles. Data analysis results include distributions of fuel economy, energy consumption, trip lengths, distance between charging events, and spatial and temporal distributions of charging events.

Nanocellulose Pilot Plant- more info

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Italics mine.

The Forest Service’s Forest Products Laboratory is poised to become the country’s leading producer of forest-based nanomaterials with the opening of a $1.7 million nanocellulose pilot plant. The facility will support an emerging market for new wood-derived renewable materials that will create jobs and contribute billions of dollars to the economy.

As new products are developed and commercialized, fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced, manufacturing in rural areas will increase, and many new high-paying jobs will be created. FPL’s new facility will aid in the commercialization of these materials by providing researchers and early adopters of the technology with working quantities of forest-based nanomaterials.

Tidwell said the plants technology will take woody material that needs to be removed from forests and develop it into a biomaterial that is commercially viable. He said the products created in the plant have the potential to replace currently-used plastics.

Vilsack said the plant represents and innovative way to create and export products that haven’t been created before.

“This is all designed to reformulate the American economy to an economy that is based on what we make rather than what we consume,” Vilsack said.

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Seems like a good idea.. take something not needed in the woods, make it commercially viable and replace something that uses more fossil fuels..? No?