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The following press release was sent out yesterday by Portland State University. – mk

Researchers at Portland State University and Oregon State University looking at the aftermath of wildfires in southwestern Oregon and northern California found that after 20 years, even in severely burned areas, Douglas-fir grew back on its own without the need for salvage logging and replanting.

The study, published online Oct. 26 in the journal Forest Ecology and Management, is the latest to address the contentious issue of whether forest managers should log dead timber and plant new trees after fires, or let them regenerate on their own.

Melissa Lucash, an assistant research professor of geography in PSU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a co-author of the study, said that concerns in the Klamath over whether conifer forests would regenerate after high-severity fires have led to salvage logging, replanting and shrub removal on federal lands throughout the region.

But the study found that the density of Douglas-fir was relatively high after 20 years and was unaffected by whether or not a site had been managed.

“This is an area where forest managers are really worried that the Douglas-fir won’t come back, but what we found is that they come back just fine on their own,” she said. “We forget the power of natural regeneration and that these burned sites don’t need to be salvage logged and planted.”

Lucash suggests that those resources could instead be reallocated elsewhere, perhaps to thinning forests to prevent high-severity wildfires.

The research team also included Maria Jose Lopez, a research associate at Universidad del Cono Sur de las Americas in Paraguay; Terry Marcey, a recent graduate of PSU’s Environmental Science and Management program; David Hibbs, a professor emeritus in Oregon State University’s College of Forestry; Jeff Shatford, a terrestrial habitat specialist in British Columbia’s Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development; and Jonathan Thompson, a senior ecologist for Harvard Forest.

The authors sampled 62 field sites that had severely burned 20 years prior on both north and south slopes of the Klamath-Siskiyou Mountain — some of which had been salvaged logged and replanted and others that had been left to regenerate on its own.

Among the study’s findings:

• Aspect, or the direction a slope faces, played an important role in determining the effectiveness of post-fire practices.

• Density of Douglas-fir was higher on north than south aspects, but was unaffected by whether or not a site had been managed, suggesting that Douglas-fir regeneration is inherently less abundant on hot and dry sites and management does not influence the outcome.

• On the flip side, management practices increased the density of ponderosa pine on south aspects, but had no impact on north aspects. That finding suggests that with rising temperatures and increasing severity of fires in the region, management would be most effective when tailored to promote drought-tolerant ponderosa pine on south aspects.

• Managed sites had taller conifers, which can improve fire resistance, but also had fewer snags — an important habitat feature for bird, small mammals and amphibian species in the region.

The authors recommend that forest managers should avoid applying the same post-fire management practices everywhere and should instead tailor practices to specific objectives and the landscape context.

AP article today:

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Utah Gov. Gary Herbert is planning to ask the U.S. Department of Agriculture for permission to thin forests, clear out dead trees and do controlled burnings on protected areas that account for nearly half of national forest lands in the state.

The Republican governor is seeking to adjust how the U.S. Forest Service’s Roadless Area Conservation Rule is applied in the state to allow for better state influence over national forests following a particularly brutal wildfire season, The Salt Lake Tribune reported this week.

The rule protects listed national forest lands that do not have roads from some activities that would require new roads. The rule covers more than 6,500 square miles (16,800 square kilometers) of forest lands in Utah.

The state’s effort is intended to give forest managers the flexibility they need for projects to make forests more resilient and protect watersheds, air quality and wildlife habitat, Herbert spokesman Paul Edwards said.

….

The following press release is from Friends of the Clearwater and Friends of Rapid River. -mk

Friends of Rapid River, a local group of concerned citizens in Pollock, Idaho, and Friends of the Clearwater, headquartered in Moscow, Idaho, filed suit in federal court in Idaho to protect the wildlife habitat in the Little Salmon and Rapid River drainages of the Nez Perce National Forest from a large logging project that went through minimal environmental review.

The groups are challenging the Forest Service’s approval of Windy Shingle, which would log 2510 acres within the watershed of Rapid River. The project includes massive clear-cutting and roadwork covering just over 58 miles, including over 5 miles of new so-called temporary roads.

The area consists of large grassy openings interspersed with forests. The citizens are concerned heavy logging would remove needed cover for elk and other species that need older forested habitats. The two groups claim in the suit that the Forest Service’s approval of this project violates the National Forest Management Act, which requires the Forest Service to abide by its forest plans regarding protection of habitat. For example, the suit quotes from the Nez Perce National Forest Plan, which requires the agency to, “[v]erify the quality, amount, and distribution of existing and replacement old-growth habitat as part of project planning;” and, that old-growth stands will be “inventoried and prioritized [for retention] with highest priority for inventory in those drainages with proposed timber sales or other activities that could adversely impact old growth.” In particular, the forest plan identifies pileated woodpecker, goshawk, fisher and marten and indicator species of old growth habitat. The suit also asserts that the project approval violates the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to adequately look at the changed condition of this proposed timber sale in light of the recent fires.

“We, Friends of Rapid River, are concerned about keeping old growth and older forests for elk cover. This area is already diverse with large natural openings for grazing and foraging. Elk need the remaining forested areas,” stated Ray Petersen.

Gary Macfarlane of Friends of the Clearwater said, “Species like marten, fisher, and goshawks need old forests. However, the cursory analysis does not demonstrate that the timber sale meets the forest plan requirements to protect those species. In addition, the changes to the area from the Rattlesnake Fire have not been properly considered as required by the National Environmental Policy Act.” Macfarlane concluded, “It appears the Forest Service rushed through the process by using a cookie-cutter approach that does not apply to the landscape.”

The following post was written by Kevin Proescholdt. Kevin is the conservation director for Wilderness Watch, a national wilderness conservation organization headquartered in Missoula and focused on the protection and defense of the National Wilderness Preservation System. For additional background information, see this other piece from Kevin titled, Growing Threat of Inappropriate Research and Instrumentation in Wilderness. – mk

Wilderness Watch recently objected to a Forest Service decision to allow permanent seismic monitoring stations in the Glacier Peak Wilderness in Washington state. If this decision doesn’t change, the Forest Service would fail to protect and preserve Glacier Peak’s wilderness conditions consistent with the 1964 Wilderness Act. Beyond Glacier Peak, any Wilderness—including those surrounding seismically-active Yellowstone National Park or elsewhere in Montana—would be damaged by the installation and servicing of any kind of permanent monitoring stations.

Wilderness is a uniquely American idea and ideal. We are incredibly lucky we still have some of it left. The framers of the Wilderness Act constantly reminded us that we would have to practice humility and restraint to keep it around. That means that all of us, visitors, managers, and other users, have to be willing to do things differently in order to preserve Wilderness for present and future generations. It’s not always easy, but it’s necessary. That’s why the recent proposal for permanent instrument installations raises concerns.

The 1964 Wilderness Act includes safeguards against permanent installations and structures in designated Wilderness, even if done for scientific purposes. Section 4(c) of this landmark law states, “…there shall be no temporary road, no use of motor vehicles, motorized equipment or motorboats, no landing of aircraft, no other form of mechanical transport, and no structure or installation within any such area.” (Emphases added.) The law therefore prevents the installation of permanent seismic monitoring stations in Wilderness as well as the landing of helicopters or use of any other motorized equipment to service the stations.

The Wilderness Act does provide a very narrow exception to allow otherwise-prohibited activities, but only where such activities are necessary to preserve the area’s wilderness character. To date, the Forest Service has utterly failed to prove that degrading the Glacier Peak Wilderness with permanent structures and installations, the landing of helicopters, and the use of any other motorized equipment is the minimum necessary for preserving the area’s wilderness character.

Wilderness Watch supports scientific research in Wilderness. It is one of the primary reasons for wilderness designation and one of its greatest values. Like other activities in Wilderness, however, scientific research has to be done in a way that protects the other values of Wilderness and doesn’t include those things that the law prohibits, such as the use of helicopters for access and the installation of permanent structures. In other words, like all other wilderness visitors, including Forest Service or other wilderness managers, researchers should walk or use packstock to access Wilderness and carry in their supplies.

Our organization also supports public safety and a better understanding of seismic activity. Warning signs of an eruption, which are usually detectable outside of Wilderness, tend to be normal for Cascade Range volcanoes. Such warning signs generally precede any eruption by a significant length of time. Increasingly, researchers are also able to monitor seismic activity remotely, even from satellites. But if monitoring must be done inside designated Wilderness, it must comply with the Wilderness Act and not degrade that specific Wilderness.

Unfortunately, the Forest Service typically does not analyze any alternatives beyond the proposals submitted by the U.S. Geological Survey or other researchers. First and foremost would be the question of whether monitoring stations near or just outside the Wilderness could provide any useful monitoring data. These data may not be quite as detailed or complete as data collected from inside the Wilderness, but would likely be adequate. Unfortunately for the Glacier Peak Wilderness, the Forest Service hasn’t even looked at this sort of analysis. The Forest Service has simply failed to uphold its obligations under the Wilderness Act to protect Wilderness and merely rubber-stamped the proposal to degrade this spectacular Wilderness.

Wilderness Watch believes the federal wilderness agencies can do better and should devise plans that uphold the letter and spirit of the Wilderness Act, and not simply cast aside this important national inheritance because it causes some inconvenience and challenge for researchers. We needn’t so easily sacrifice our shared wilderness heritage just for a few additional data points as is often proposed.

The following press release was released today by Swan View Coalition.

Kalispell, MT – A Kalispell-based conservation group is critical of a huge, landscape-scale “restoration project” announced today by the Flathead National Forest as a collaborative proposal for logging and other management activities in the Swan Valley. “Even at a glance,” said Swan View Coalition Chair Keith Hammer, “this huge project does not qualify as landscape restoration. It is instead a big logging project requiring even more logging roads be built in the already over-roaded Swan Valley.”

“The proposal fails to identify logging roads as a threat to terrestrial wildlife, let alone as the primary threat research says they are for elk, bears and virtually every species of wildlife,” Hammer said. “Instead, the Forest Service proposes to build new roads through high elevation avalanche chutes that are currently roadless and rebuild roads in avalanche chutes where the culverts were rightly removed because they kept plugging up with avalanche debris.” (For example, new roads are proposed through avalanche chutes on the south slopes of Napa Ridge in the Goat Creek watershed. A road previously put to bed in North Lost Creek, on the south slopes of Springslide Mountain, would be rebuilt).

Even though the proposal claims to “stormproof” roads to reduce the chances of culverts failing during high runoff, Hammer says that’s not the same as eliminating that risk by removing the culverts so they can’t blow out. “This huge project is a significant departure from the current Forest Plan that requires culverts be removed from roads not only to protect fish, but to also render the roads impassable and fully re-vegetated to protect terrestrial wildlife,” Hammer said. “This project is a peek at the revised Forest Plan that will remove limits on the miles of road the Flathead can have in grizzly bear habitat.”

Hammer points to the fact that the proposal would require two Forest Plan amendments suspending lynx management standards as another indication this is not a true “restoration” project. “If the Forest Service and its collaborators think they need to suspend lynx habitat management standards in order to restore lynx habitat, maybe they should focus on proving the standards are wrong and changing them rather than simply sidestepping them,” Hammer said. “This is just one more example of collaborative groups working to help the Forest Service get around the law rather than comply with it.”

The Flathead’s “Mid-Swan Landscape Restoration and Wildland Urban Interface Project” and Federal Register notice can be found at: https://www.fs.usda.gov/project/?project=54853

The Washington Post recently ran this story:

“A Colorado resort area comes to the aid of a cash-strapped national forest”

Excerpt:

“The visitor boom — while great for the local economy — is putting a strain on the public lands that are the reason people vacation, day-trip and retire to the Vail Valley. The cash-strapped U.S. Forest Service isn’t equipped to handle the more than 12 million people who come to the 2.3-million-acre White River National Forest each year.

“So Vail and other Eagle County governments are planning to set aside as much as $120,000 to pay for Forest Service employees to monitor trails and campgrounds and to enforce backcountry rules next summer.”

FWIW, the book I edited, 193 Million Acres: Toward a Healthier and More Resilient US Forest Service (recently published by the Society of American Foresters) includes two essays that address the problem, including one by our own Sharon Friedman:

“Wild and Free: Diverse Dispersed Recreation as the Forest Service’s Main Mission,” by Sharon Friedman

“Implementing Sustainable Recreation on the National Forest System: Aligning the Reality and Promise,” by Steven Selin

In addition, I suggest a potential solution in my introduction — excerpt below….

The book is on sale on the SAF web site, www.eforester.org/store (although it isn’t yet listed in SAF’s online store, you can find it by searching for “193 Million Acres”). Proceeds (if there are any after paying production costs), go to support SAF, a non-profit organization.

Steve

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Excerpt from the introduction to 193 Million Acres:

Selin calls on Congress and the Forest Service to “provide a strategic, focused, financial investment” in the agency’s recreation program. The Forest Service’s Framework for Sustainable Recreation (FSR), released in 2010, did not include such an investment. “It is high time the agency did so now,” wrote Selin. It seems unlikely that Congress will provide sufficient funding for this kind of investment in recreation or for addressing other elements of the backlog Thompson mentions. Perhaps an increase in the agency’s ability to be creative and flexible is in order.

For example, a national forest with a large backlog of deferred recreation facility maintenance, given the freedom to develop a solution on its own, might use stewardship contracting of the sort Tholen and others write about. In forest-health projects, a stewardship contractor typically thins an overcrowded stand and uses some of the proceeds from selling the merchantable timber to pay for the removal of small trees and brush that have little or no value, or for other ecological restoration services. The emphasis is on ecological: projects that are not primarily intended to restore or improve ecological conditions or functions aren’t allowed. According to the Forest Service handbook, “construction of developed campgrounds” and “maintenance of non-haul roads not causing water quality degradation”—roads not primarily intended for transporting harvested timber—are not appropriate stewardship contracting activities.

What if every national forest had the freedom to develop a long-term stewardship or service contract under which an amount of timber is harvested each year to pay for some or all of the recreation and/or other infrastructure construction and maintenance planned for the following year, even if such work has no significant environmental benefit? Revenues might be deposited in a recreation or infrastructure maintenance fund; any surplus funds would be carried over to the following year, saved for a rainy day (including the effects of a flood after a particularly rainy day), or spent on other recreation- or transportation-related projects, such building a new campground or fixing potholes. Advice on such expenditures could be sought from the forest’s resource advisory committee (RAC), and RAC recommendations would carry a great deal of weight. Donations to such funds might come from corporations, nonprofit groups, and individuals; in her essay, Friedman suggests something similar in a discussion the importance of “friends of the forest” groups.

An article titled “How Wildfires Are Polluting Rivers and Threatening Water Supplies” Published at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies makes the following points:

1) “As hotter and dryer conditions spawn an increasing number of wildfires in North America and around the world, one of the overlooked impacts of these worsening conflagrations is on aquatic environments and drinking water supplies. Just as wildfires can have a regenerative effect on woodlands, so, too, can fires provide some benefits to streams and rivers in burned areas. But scientists are warning that intense and repeated fires can damage the ecology of waterways by exposing them to the sun’s heat, exacerbating flooding and erosion along denuded hillsides, and releasing toxins such as mercury that are often liberated from soil and tree trunks.”

2) “Water treatment plants in those places were overwhelmed by sedimentation, dissolved organic carbon, and chemicals that were released by fire.”

3) ““Forests yield 40 percent of the water for the world’s 100 largest cities,” she says. “Many of these cities are already water-stressed because of drought, climate change, and increasing water consumption.”

4) “the Hayman Fire, which burned 138,000 acres across four counties in 2002, forcing the closure of some federal and state parks at the height of the tourist season. The intense fires removed many of the trees from parts of the mountain landscape. In the hot drought conditions that followed, the soils in those denuded landscapes baked. Some spring-fed streams stopped flowing. Chemical compounds that were vaporized by the fire got driven into the soil. As they condensed, they formed an impervious layer just below the surface.
Without trees, vegetation, and a stable soil structure to absorb the heavy rains that followed, tons of ash, debris, heavy metals, and nutrients were flushed through the watershed. This resulted in the precipitous decline of the blue-ribbon South Platte River trout fishery. Worst of all was that the affected watershed provides drinking water to 75 percent of the state’s residents. Hundreds of tons of sediment filled lakes and reservoirs. Intakes became clogged. Water quality suffered not just for a few days, but for several years.”

5) “Canberra suffered terribly in 2003 when fires blackened the landscape along the Cotter watershed, which provides 96 percent of the water for the 350,000 people who live in Canberra and nearby Queanbeyan. Heavy rains that followed caused massive erosion and flooding. More than 2,800 tons of sediment and an array of metals such as iron and manganese were dumped into the watershed. The quality of water was so poor that the city of Canberra was forced to build a new water treatment plant.”

6) “In the Alberta tar sands town of Fort McMurray, … The biggest issue, according to Emelko, is the dissolved organic carbon that is released by wildfires. When mixed with the chlorine that is used to treat water, it can produce carcinogens that most treatment plant technicians don’t have the expertise to manage. To deal with the challenges, Fort McMurray is now spending more than twice as much on chemicals as it did before the fire burned along the Athabasca River.”

7) “Wildfires are not always bad for watersheds, … Fish, however, are vulnerable to the chemicals that are often liberated by fire. Scientist Erin Kelly discovered this in the summer of 2000 when a wildfire in Jasper National Park coincided with a study she was conducting on mercury concentrations in alpine lakes. Following the fire, the doubling of the lake’s nitrogen concentration and a quadrupling of the phosphorus concentration was not a big surprise. What was not expected was a five-fold increase of mercury in fish.”

8) “invertebrates feasted on the nutrients and mercury that the fire introduced. Rainbow trout and lake herring capitalized on that bounty of invertebrates, and passed on the mercury to lake trout that prey on them. At the top of this food chain, the concentrations were high enough for government officials to issue a health warning for fish consumption by humans.”

9) “John Moody says there are two things to watch for in the future: the intensity and frequency of forest fires, and the extreme precipitation – those that unleash a lot of rain in 30 minutes – that follow a fire weeks and months after it is extinguished, when soils may not be able to absorb as much moisture as they normally do. Those are the events that can cause severe flooding, extreme sedimentation, and the liberation of undesirable chemicals.”

Last month on this blog we discussed and debated new research from the University of Montana’s Dr. Diana Six, one of the world-wide leader in the study of Forest Entomology/Pathology.

Today, journalist Brandon Keim (who has provided insightful comments on this blog for a few years now) had the following piece published in Anthropocene Magazine.

Western forests could adapt to pine beetles, but people won’t let them
By Brandon Keim

Though sporadic pine beetle outbreaks are a natural part of western U.S. ecosystems, a combination of climate change and drought have made them epidemic. The outbreaks are unusually large and intense, raising fears that pine forests may collapse — yet it seems that some trees are genetically predisposed to withstand attack.

They may contain the seeds of future forests adapted to warmer temperatures and pine beetle attacks. As of now, however, people are managing afflicted forests in ways that may prevent their recovery.

“Our forests have always been shaped by natural selection, and management largely ignores this,” says Diana Six, a forest entomologist at the University of Montana. “Trees contain some of the highest genetic diversity of any organisms on the planet. We should be working with this.”

In a study published in Frontiers in Plant Science, Six and colleagues describe their genetic analysis of trees in Vipond Park, a plateau in Montana’s Beaverhead National Forest where pine beetles recently killed 75 percent of mature lodgepole pines and 93 percent of whitebark pines.

The survivors proved to have a common genetic signature. That’s not particularly surprising, say the researchers: pine trees and pine beetles have shared that landscape for millennia, so natural selection would have favored resistant trees during previous outbreaks. And while the researchers don’t yet know the mechanism — perhaps survivors possess extra-hardy immune systems or produce beetle-discouraging chemicals — it certainly seems heritable.

Surviving trees, then, could be “key to developing management and trajectories that allow for forest adaptation,” write the researchers — and not just in Vipond Park, but across the west. Yet that resilience is threatened by so-called salvage logging, which often removes both dead and sick-but-surviving trees from the landscape, and large-scale replanting projects.

The latter are an even greater threat than salvage logging, says Six, because they effectively dilute the survivors’ contributions to forest gene pools. Instead of a new forest descended from trees adapted to pine beetles and climate change, the trees are just as vulnerable as before.

Large-scale replanting with adapted trees isn’t yet feasible, says Six. Eventually she hopes to develop a hand-held sensor that can identify pines with beneficial traits. In the meantime, salvage logging and replanting should be undertaken with care. The lessons of this research may also apply to other forests threatened by climate change and pests.

“Supporting forest adaptation is critical in this time of rapid change,” write the researchers. We need to “support rather than hinder natural selection for traits needed under future conditions.”

Source: Diana Six, Clare Vergobbi and Mitchell Cutter. “Are Survivors Different? Genetic-Based Selection of Trees by Mountain Pine Beetle During a Climate Change-Driven Outbreak in a High-Elevation Pine Forest.” Frontiers in Plant Science, 2018.

About the author: Brandon Keim is a freelance journalist specializing in animals, nature and science, and the author of The Eye of the Sandpiper: Stories From the Living World.

Something I stumbled across that has a lot of information in one place (though I suspect some will not agree with all of it, it seems to line up pretty well with my opinions).  (Not sure what I did here, but click on “Home” to get to their website.

Home

New MSU study gauges health of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem
By Skip Anderson for the MSU News Service (Original)

BOZEMAN — A Montana State University study of Yellowstone National Park and the surrounding area shows that increased population and density, as well as a changing climate, are affecting the overall ecological health of the region.

“The study quantified trends in the condition of 35 ecological ‘vital signs’ dealing with snow, rivers, forests, fire, wildlife and fish,” said Andrew Hansen, professor in the MSU Department of Ecologyin the College of Letters and Science.

“The human population has doubled — and housing density has tripled — in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem since 1970, and both are projected to double again by 2050,” Hansen said. “Plus, the temperature has warmed 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1950 and is projected to increase by another 4.5 to 9.4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.”

Hansen, who is also director of MSU’s Landscape Biodiversity Lab, co-authored the paper “Trends in Vital Signs for Greater Yellowstone: Application of a Wildland Health Index,” with Linda Phillips, a research scientist in MSU’s Department of Ecology. The science journal Ecosphere published the article in August.

“These changes in land use and climate have reduced snowpack and stream flows, increased stream temperatures, favored pest outbreaks and forest die-off, fragmented habitat types, expanded invasive species, and reduced native fish populations,” Hansen said.

The study uncovered good news, too, for the habitat and some animals that call it home. Large mammals, including bear and elk, are increasing in numbers and expanding in range, according to the study.

Also notable is the new methodology the MSU scientists used, called the Wildland Health Index, which resulted in a reader-friendly “report card.”

“Physicians use ‘vital signs’ such as blood pressure to gauge the heath of humans,” Hansen said. “What we’re trying to do with the Wildland Health Index is something similar by adding value to data that allows a variety of people to understand the trends in ecological health.”

To do this, Hansen and Phillips evaluated the data to identify the trends over times in the GYE’s vital signs and used criteria to rate them from “deteriorating” to “stable and improving.”

“We then boil down the metrics to the six or eight key vital signs that will matter to policymakers,” Hansen said. “And, this study can be applied each year across the GYE and used for other large wildland ecosystems in the United States to better inform land managers to assist them in sustaining these special places.”

Diane Debinski, head of MSU’s Department of Ecology, said the index is a new tool that can be used measure ecosystem health around the world.

“Because the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem serves as an icon for wildland management, the Hansen and Phillips Wildland Health Index will have global reach, serving as a template for similar assessments worldwide,” she said.

Hansen noted that the ecological health of the region was strongest inside the boundaries of Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. That’s not surprising, he said, given the focus of its caretakers in managing the ecological health of the parks. He said this study shows that the greatest need for improvement is outside the parks, where private landowners don’t necessarily have access to data that may help them be better stewards of the land they own and the water that passes through it.

“There’s a real opportunity to let people know what they might worry about on their own property with regard to impact,” Hansen said.

He also indicated that there’s plenty of room in the near future for citizen scientists to gather and report data that will help policymakers as they consider the overall ecological health of the GYE, which includes tens of thousands of square miles beyond Yellowstone National Park, including Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

“We have so little information about large river systems, especially on private lands,” Hansen said. “There’s just no consistent monitoring of water quality on those major rivers on a scale that can tell us how well they’re doing, and that’s surprising because so many people here love our blue-ribbon trout streams that we’re famous for.

“There’s real opportunity to engage people to do the monitoring and the science to fill in the gaps,” he added. “One could visualize high school students across the GYE doing water-quality monitoring and submitting the data to a central repository. By doing so, they become heavily engaged participants.”