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ANREP 2020 Conference Reminder
NREEF Announcement
ANREP PD Committee Survey
ANREP Scholarships
Upcoming Conferences & Workshops
ANROSP Oct. 1-3
NAAEE Oct. 16-19
Sustainable Tourism & Outdoor Recreation Oct. 8-11
Online Course: Understanding Forest Carbon
WSU Rain Garden Assessment Tool
ANREP Scholarship Report: Conference Attendance
JCEP PILD Report
Phragmites Webinar
Farm-Raised Fish Survey Report
Woody Plant App
Well Water Education Request
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President's Corner
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Hello ANREP Members!
Things are moving along briskly at ANREP. Ms. Leslie Boby-Sabatinelli is performing wonderfully as our new Executive Secretary. We are very fortunate to have found such a capable person with experience in ANREP and in southern Extension Forestry.
The 2020 conference planning committee is making great progress. The date for next year's conference will be May 3-6 in Bend, Oregon. Be looking for further details on the conference, mobile workshops, and sights on interest on the ANREP webpage.
We welcome the Alabama chapter to ANREP! We are excited by this expansion of our organization, and are looking forward on working together to promote natural resources Extension education. Moreover, at this time, South Carolina has submitted their bylaws to form an ANREP chapter as well. We encourage any states for form their own chapter, especially since we now have a "bylaws template" for your organization to begin.
I am committed to serving this amazing organization as your President. If you ever want to talk to me about issues in ANREP, please don't hesitate to contact me.
Sincerely,
(662) 566-8013
ANREP President, 2019
North Mississippi Research & Extension Center
Mississippi State University
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ANREP Updates
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MUST READ: Have You Heard About NREEF?
The NATURAL RESOURCE EXTENSION EDUCATION FOUNDATION, INC. (NREEF) is an educational charity founded in 2019 by past ANREP Presidents and others to support ANREP and aligned Extension Education activities and programs. NREEF promotes the advancement, knowledge, and understanding of natural resources - their conservation and management - for the betterment of the environment and society. We are a 501(c)(3) organization with national scope, incorporated and founded in 2019. We need your financial support!
Why Should You Give to NREEF?
- Ensure a strong bright future for natural resources Extension education, especially that done by ANREP members.
- Support your values regarding conservation and environmental resources education.
- Establish a fund or program that bears your name or the name of someone you wish to honor in perpetuity.
- Provide tax savings for your estate and heirs.
How Can You Give to NREEF?
All donations to NREEF are 100% tax deductible. They can be given by mailing a check (made out to "NREEF") to our Treasurer, Dean Solomon, at 859 Deer Run Drive, Boyne City, MI 49712. You can also give to NREEF via a bequest. A bequest is a statement in your Will or Living Trust describing your wishes to make a charitable donation after your death. It is also common to provide similar charitable designations through a retirement plan or IRA, life insurance, and/or revocable and irrevocable trusts.
Where Do Donor Funds Go?
Funds received by the NREEF are used to support natural resources educational events, initiatives, and efforts conducted by ANREP. They are also used to provide financial support for other educational associations' and agencies' events related to natural resources and conservation education.
How is NREEF Structured?
NREEF is governed by a board of volunteer Trustees, with three Trustee officers, a President, Vice President, Secretary, and a volunteer (non-voting) Treasurer.
The current slate of NREEF Leaders are:
Got Expertise to Share?
Share your expertise with NREEF concerning fundraising, marketing, and development by contacting any of the Trustees or Treasurer listed above. We need your help!
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ANREP Professional Development Committee Wants to Hear from YOU!
In anticipation of the upcoming 2020 ANREP conference in Oregon, your ANREP Professional Development (PD) Committee is considering offering hands-on workshops and talks that will help you develop the core competencies needed to better do your job.
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ANREP Scholarships Available
The ANREP Board would like to announce the second round of a new professional development scholarship. Members who are in good standing two years in a row (the year of the application and the prior year) may apply for up to $500 to attend PILD, JCEP Leadership Conference, or another relevant professional development activity. The scholarship will be available in the non-ANREP conference years. Applications are due and will be reviewed June 12
th
, 2019.
One additional note, the Scholarship Committee is looking for ONE MORE volunteer to help review applications. Please contact Diana Rashash if you are interested.
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Upcoming Conferences & Workshops
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Alliance of Natural Resource Outreach & Service Programs (ANROSP) 2019 National Conference
This dynamic conference is for professionals and partner organizations who coordinate, administer, or host training and volunteer programs in natural resource conservation, education, and outreach or for those interested in developing similar programming. This year the conference will be held in Columbia, Maryland. There will be many opportunities to explore the natural, cultural and historic sites in and around the Greater Baltimore area, with field visits to Maryland's Eastern Shore and Chesapeake Bay, including Adkins Arboretum in the Coastal Plains Region, and Phillips Wharf Environmental Education Center on Tilghman Island. During this conference, participants gain knowledge from a diverse range of programs, network with colleagues, and obtain valuable tools to enhance an existing program or develop a new one.
The call for presentations is open. Proposals due June 13, 2019.
The Alliance of Natural Resource Outreach and Service Programs (ANROSP) is a national consortium of natural resource-focused adult education and stewardship programs, including Master Naturalists, Master Watershed Stewards, Wildlife Stewards, Master Woodland Mangers, Open Space Programs, and more. ANROSP facilitates networking and exchange of information and resources among coordinators of service-oriented environmental education programs across the United States and helps create healthy ecosystems and communities through participants who learn, teach, and practice natural resource stewardship.
For more information about the conference and ANROSP, visit the ANROSP web site.
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North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE) Conference
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Sustainable Tourism & Outdoor Recreation Conference
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Submitted Articles
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Online Course: Understanding Forest Carbon Management
Healthy and expansive forests are crucial to mitigating climate change, protecting habitat, water, and air quality, and enhancing community resilience. The ability of forests to sequester and store carbon is dependent on the management behaviors of millions of federal, state, local, and private forest landowners and natural resources professionals.
Understanding Forest Carbon Management is designed for these landowners and will provide a robust introduction to the benefits of forest land management specific to carbon while offering clear action paths. Topic areas include carbon cycle and storage science, domestic and international policy, project case studies, management considerations, measurement basics, and available tools and support.
This course will be offered entirely online and will be self-paced to best suit participant schedules. The estimated time to completion is 6-8 weeks. While the course was designed with natural resource professionals, extension agents, and landowners in mind, all interested individuals are invited to participate.
The FCCP will be hosting an informational webinar regarding this short course on
June 6th at 3:00pm EST. This webinar will be hosted by the FCCP Program Director, Lauren Cooper. Additional time will be available at the end of the webinar for an open Q+A.
Please register to attend this webinar.
More information about Understanding Forest Carbon Management can be found
online or by
emailing.
Submitted by:
Emily Huff, Assistant Professor, Human Dimensions of Natural Resources
Michigan State University
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Washington State University Develops a Rain Garden Assessment Tool
Rain gardens and bioretention facilities are considered to be effective tools in the Green Stormwater Infrastructure toolbox and are being implemented at an accelerating rate. Project partners, WSU Extension, Stewardship Partners and the City of Puyallup have developed a rain garden and bioretention assessment protocol that builds our region's capacity to monitor basic functions of rain gardens and bioretention facilities and assess factors influencing their success and failure. The protocol was developed to allow ease of implementation, repeatability across large geographic scales and multiple implementers, and provide data of scientific and adaptive management value.
The key questions that this project answers are:
- What attributes of rain garden/bioretention functionality measured by volunteers and staff through visual observations and simple field tests correlate best predict functional success of the system?
- What design, construction, and maintenance actions identifiable by volunteers and staff have the greatest correlation with functional success of a rain garden/bioretention facility?
- A greater understanding of landowner values about rain gardens and rain garden maintenance incentives.
Through an extensive literature search, a social science survey and two rounds of pilot studies, our team of academics, permittees, and on-the-ground experts with extensive experience in measuring rain garden/bioretention function have developed effectiveness metrics as a framework for the evaluation of rain garden/bioretention effectiveness. WSU Extension developed and led the pilot studies which included the training of 90 volunteers who conducted replicate assessments of over 41 facilities in 4 Puget Sound counties. This framework also provides insight into how installation methods and maintenance practices predict functional success of bioretention/rain garden success. The targeted effectiveness metrics include soil characteristics, inflow/outflow blockages, plant viability, public acceptance, maintenance issues, and whether or not the installation is still collecting runoff.
What the assessment can do:
- Flag important functional concerns
- Hydrology
- Vegetation and Public Perception
- Flag facilities that are prone to issues
- Indicate the concerns and guide remediation
- Be implemented with little or no training and at a low relative cost
- Help standardize assessment data and identify common issues to inform:
- Future design considerations
- Future maintenance protocols
What the assessment can't do:
- Precisely quantify hydrologic performance
- Precisely quantify overall effectiveness of a facility nor of bioretention as a whole
- Quantify treatment performance
The project team developed and piloted a 15 question social science survey that explored landowner perspectives and experiences in the following categories:
- Benefits and challenges of owning rain gardens or bioretention facilities
- Perceived facility success and the reasons underlying those views
- Perceived barriers for installations
- Current maintenance activities (including who conducts maintenance and factors influencing maintenance decisions)
- Understanding of facility stormwater management purpose
- Personal demographics related to relationship to facility (owner - builder, owner - purchaser, renter, business representative, etc.)
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| Volunteers assess rain garden function in Port Townsend, WA |
The survey was emailed to approximately 2000 rain garden owners and 58 people responded. The full report and results can be found at the website below.
WSU Extension has developed a
website to share this information, which includes the monitoring forms, instructions, an instructional webinar (which might feature some of you!) and a presentation about the project.
This replicable, streamlined monitoring protocol will enable NPDES permittees to monitor progress consistently, economically and effectively. It will also be a useful tool to compare and share data between municipalities allowing for region-wide evaluation of progress as well as foster collaborative approaches to shared obstacles.
Submitted by:
Associate Professor
Washington State University Extension
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ANREP Scholarship Assists with Conference Attendance
With the generous help of a Professional Development Scholarship from ANREP, I represented Utah State University Forestry Extension and traveled to the
National Sustainability Summit & National Extension Energy Summit in Tampa, Florida in April. Our team presented a poster on our efforts to replace broken sidewalks with an innovative, green building product: permeable pavement. Upward pressure from tree roots often push up and damage sidewalks, creating problems for municipalities. Instead of removing large urban trees and replacing broken sidewalks with new concrete, this alternative technique allows trees to remain in place while replacing broken sections of concrete with small sections of permeable pavement. In 2018 we partnered with the City of Ogden and demonstrated its use in that city. We have plans to partner with other municipalities in 2019. At the NSS & NEES conference,
our poster earned us a Green Award Recognition for Leadership in Extension Sustainability Programming. While I was certainly proud of this recognition, the highlight of the conference for me was the contagious energy and persistence my colleagues bring to problems facing their communities.
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Damaged sidewalk (left) that was replaced with permeable pavement (right) in 2018 in Ogden, Utah.
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Because of its geography and elevation, Florida is particularly vulnerable to risks from climate change such as increasingly powerful hurricanes and rising ocean levels. This conference brought together professionals tackling issues pertaining to sustainability and energy. Here is just a sample of the workshops and talks I experienced while at the conference:
- Erik Lovestrand and his team are engaging stakeholders to darken the lights on (and in) buildings located near important sea turtle nesting beaches. Darkening these lights increases the ability of newly hatched turtles to locate and enter the ocean - this program has successfully improved juvenile turtle survivability.
- Lisa Hickey and her team have been providing education and free container gardens for areas of SW Florida deemed "food deserts" - this program has successfully allowed citizens to grow, eat and take pride in producing their own healthy, local, and fresh food.
- Yilin Zhuang is using a simple demonstration for K-12 students involving a mason jar, colorful plastic beads, and rubbing alcohol to demonstrate how plastics and plastic debris make their way into oceans and persist in the water column, threatening oceans and wildlife.
These are just a few examples of the innovative ways Extension professionals are finding ways to educate and engage the public while demonstrating practical solutions to persistent problems. This conference left me inspired to tackle issues facing Utahans with a fresh perspective. I would encourage any Extension employee to take the time to attend and present at a conference. I've never met a more friendly and solution-oriented group of professionals. I've only been an Extension employee for 5 years, however I feel like family every time I attend an Extension conference. This comradery as well as learning about the innovative ways other professionals are empowering and engaging with their communities has left this Extension Educator feeling inspired and recharged.
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Ramona Madhosingh-Hector presenting Megan Dettenmaier, Utah State University Forestry Extension Educator, with the Green Award for Recognition for Leadership in Extension Sustainability Programming at the NSS & NEES Summit in Tampa, Florida.
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Submitted by:
Megan Dettanmaier
Extension Educator, Forestry
Utah State University
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JCEP PILD Conference--Always a Great Experience!
I attended the
JCEP PILD Conference back in April 2019 for the second year in a row. This professional development conference is one that I have enjoyed attending in the past and this year was no exception. The theme of the conference was
Enhancing Leadership Capacity for Emerging Issues. All the keynote speakers and talks centered around leadership and tools on how to do that with the issues we face in Extension today.
I have to say that the conference started out a bit rocky with the power going out and staying out for the first couple of hours Monday morning. But we are nothing but resilient and flexible in Extension and our first keynote managed to both talk and act out his presentation without the use of PowerPoint or having power. Paul Hill, Extension Associate Professor at Utah State University, did do an interpretive dance for us, explained what we would be seeing if we could view his amazing PowerPoint, and used both a flip chart and flashlight to highlight key points. Luckily during the second keynote presentation the power came back on but Heather Mannix, Assistant Director of Policy Engagement for COMPASS, started her presentation with also using a flip chart to highlight key points.
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Paul Hill presenting in the dark. Credit: Holly Abeels.
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Heather Mannix guide for honing your message. Credit: Holly Abeels
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Me (Holly Abeels) at my poster.
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The breakout sessions led into discussions around wicked issues, disaster planning, food safety, technology, leadership development, and culture. We also heard from National Program Leaders during breakout sessions. I always enjoy the discussion (and the skit on what to do and not to do) about communicating on the Hill and having feedback from legislative staffers on their expectations when you meet with them. The conference ended with an entertaining capnote presentation from Dr. Doug Steele, APLU Vice President for Food Agriculture and Natural Resources. We learned a bit more about him (and his wife) personally and it gave us all some food for thought as we finished our time together.
If you've never been to this conference, I highly recommend it. It's one of my favorite to attend and I always walk away feeling energized about how Extension is moving forward. Save the Date for next year's conference which will be April 5-8 at the same location. Maybe I'll see you there!
Florida Sea Grant Extension Agent
UF/IFAS Extension
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ResourceExchange
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Free Webinar: A Framework for Strategic Response to Invasive
Phragmites australis in Minnesota
Join MNPhrag researchers on May 22 (12:00-1:00pm CDT) for a presentation and Q&A session on invasive Phragmites response strategies in Minnesota.
Invasive Phragmites (Phragmites australis subsp. australis) is a non-native wetland grass that can degrade fish and wildlife habitat, native plant diversity, and impede access to lakes and riverways. Over the past two years, researchers at the University of Minnesota have been investigating the distribution of invasive Phragmites in the state.
MNPhrag researchers recently developed an assessment of capacity and possible strategies to support such an effort. Visit
www.mnphrag.org
for more information about the MNPhrag project and invasive Phragmites in Minnesota.
The webinar will be recorded and available for later viewing.
Contact: Megan Weber
, Extension Educator, Aquatic Invasive Species, University of Minnesota Extension
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Wisconsin Consumers and Farm-Raised Fish
Read this report on a statewide survey of
Wisconsin consumers to better understand their attitudes toward farm-raised fish. In Summer 2018, we randomly surveyed 3,000 households in Wisconsin to help fish farmers expand their business and capitalize on the trend for local food, while also being responsive to consumer concerns.
Contact:
Bret Shaw, Associate Professor and Extension Specialist, UW-Madison
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Woody Plant App Now Available
Colorado State University is launching a state-wide Woody Plant App to help people identify the almost 200 native woody plants. The App is free and can be found by searching for "CO Woody Plants."
We also developed an emerald ash borer and ash tree ID free App that can be found by searching for "EAB/Ash Tree ID." These are in addition to our free "Colorado Wetlands Mobile App" developed by the Colorado Natural Heritage Program.
Contact:
Mark Platten, Teller County Extension Director, Colorado State University Extension
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IdeaExchange
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Interest in Well Water Education
I would like to connect with colleagues who have done well water programs. I am looking into creating a program covering the basics of well water testing, contaminants, and protection. I would like to hear what others have done, what has gone well, and what didn't.
Contact:
Madeline Roberts, Natural Resources Extension Educator, University of Wisconsin Division of Extension
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| A Word From Your Editor__________ |
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Last week I had the opportunity to spend two days with my natural resource colleagues at a field station in northern Wisconsin. The time away from my normal (is there such a thing?) schedule; time with my colleagues, who are also good friends; and the chance to pause and think more deeply about the work that we do all combined to rejuvenate me.
Two things in particular stood out for me. First, we set aside time for a long hike into the woods to explore some of the interactions between forests and the soils that nourish them. Spring is a few weeks slow in arriving this year so seeing the amazing range of greens was especially rewarding as we pondered the implications of earthworms and a changing climate on our future forests. We also got a chance to hear a number of warblers that were just arriving from the south and see some of our more colorful bird species at the feeders. Second, we took some time to view a documentary on Aldo Leopold called
Green Fire. Leopold spent a good chunk of his life in Wisconsin and is a bit of a hero to us Wisconsinites. I still have a dog-eared copy of
A Sand County Almanac on my bookshelf. It was required reading for me as an undergrad and I even took a semester-long course on Leopold and the development of a land ethic. I highly recommend the documentary. It can be a bit hard to find as you need a license to show it but check your library to see if they have it. The title comes from a story Leopold relates about his killing of a wolf in the Arizona mountains and how that event reshaped his thinking on the management of game species. I'll leave you with his thoughts on this event...
"We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes - something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view."
The next deadline for content submittals is August 1. With luck, the next newsletter will be out around August 15. Submit content at any time. Try to limit article length to 600 words. Photos (with captions/credit) are appreciated but please send them separately. Don't embed them into a document. As always, please contact me if you have questions.
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Chad Cook |
ANREP Newsletter Editor | University of Wisconsin - Madison, Division of Extension
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