The U.S. Forest Service wants visitors to the Kaibab to snap photos of plants and animals and submit them to an online database. The project will run throughout 2017.
Mark Christiano, GIS coordinator, says participants need to download a free app called iNaturalist. “It automatically collects a lot of the data for us,” he explains. “So for example, you’re not just getting the photo, but you get the location where the photo was taken [and] the timestamp. This generates really good data the forest can directly use at the end of the year.”
People can also submit audio clips, for example of bird song. Experts will then weigh in on the identity of the species. Biologists plan to use the data to monitor rare or invasive species and to inform management decisions.
Jackie Banks, public affairs officer, says, “We see this as a way our visitors can receive expert feedback on their discoveries, and we think it’s a great way to connect forest service biologists with citizen scientists and to really encourage that exploration of the Kaibab National Forest.”
The Kaibab covers 1.6 million acres and is divided by the Grand Canyon.
You can also use iNaturalist on your desktop computer. Learn more about the project on the iNaturalist website.
Officials should have doused a 1.5-acre fire in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park days before high winds created a megafire that swept into Gatlinburg, former U.S. Forest Service firefighters said .
At the very least, said retired employees with almost 200 years of firefighting experience, officials in the National Park should have summoned every resource available when alerted Nov. 26 of the expected high winds.
Former U.S. Forest Service firefighters agreed park officials didn’t pay attention to the severe drought, low humidity that provided a tinderbox for flames, available options to quell the slow-moving fire before winds made the flames uncontrollable and alarming weather forecasts.
National Park Deputy Superintendent Clay Jordan, however, said all the options outlined by park Fire Management Officer Greg Salansky, who oversaw the Chimney Tops 2 fire, “made sense to me.”
“There was no way the fire could have been extinguished before the winds came,” Jordan said. When the winds came, the fire ignored Salansky’s containment plan.
“Much to our surprise, it had spotted across Newfound Gap Road to Bullhead Ridge a half mile to a mile away,” Jordan said.
“Our fire manager has never seen fire spot that far. It was unheard of around here.”
The Blue Valley Experimental Forest (Blue Valley) lies in southwest North Carolina in the Nantahala National Forest. Located in Macon County, near the point where North Carolina meets Georgia and South Carolina, the experimental forest was established in 1964. At 1,300 acres, it is the smallest of the three experimental forests in North Carolina and the second smallest of the 19 managed by U.S. Forest Service Southern Research Station (SRS).
Blue Valley’s landscape is dominated by eastern white pine, but also includes mixed hardwood and eastern hemlock stands. Experts believe extensive grazing and logging in the early 1900s contributed to the abundance of eastern white pine. The infertile soil is typical of the southern highlands. Buckberry, a type of huckleberry, is the most prevalent of the ericaceous (acid- loving) shrubs that dominate the forest understory.
Research studies at Blue Valley started in 1995, and included experiments on management practices such as single-tree selection cutting in white pine/hardwoods, shelterwood and prescribed burning in white pine/hardwoods, and dealing with bark beetle populations. Blue Valley continues to provide opportunities to study the fundamentals of white pine ecology (including seed production and dispersal), ericaceous shrubs, and the qualities of low-fertility sites.
Blue Valley is also the site of a more recent field experiment to investigate whether sunlighting – creating gaps to allow more light to reach the tops of trees – improves the health of hemlocks infested with hemlock woolly adelgid, the insect that’s already devastated hemlocks across the southern Appalachian region.
Dropping into Southern California’s Anza-Borrego State Park from a twisting ride down Montezuma Valley Road, you get the sense Anza-Borrego is a world unto itself.
A world of ancient fossils and mysterious mirages, lush palm oases and hidden waterfalls, ocotillo forests, remote hiking trails and captivating wildlife from tarantulas and chuckwalla lizards to golden eagles and desert bighorn sheep, or borrego.
With help from several partnerships, donations and state and federal funds, the Anza-Borrego Foundation has been working to make that world whole – procuring about 54,000 acres in the last half-century.
About 67,000 acres of private parcels within the park, known as inholdings, existed when the foundation was formed to acquire inholdings or adjacent land to help preserve the desert, wildlife habitat and cultural heritage. There are still 20,000 acres of inholdings that could be acquired to complete California’s largest state park.
The foundation’s new acquisitions increase the amount of protected desert, which means more land for wildlife and more protection there for the Pacific Crest Trail corridor and the viewshed from the trail.
President Obama has designated Bears Ears National Monument in southeastern Utah and Gold Butte National Monument in southeastern Nevada. Representing the best of America’s natural wonders, these designations complete what tribes, members of Congress, state and local officials, and local business and community leaders have sought for decades.
The new monuments protect approximately 1.64 million acres of existing federal land in two spectacular western landscapes – 1.35 million acres in Utah and nearly 300,000 acres in Nevada. Both areas contain land sacred to Native American tribes, important cultural sites, and fragile wildlife habitat. The monument designations maintain currently authorized uses of the land that do not harm the resources protected by the monument, including tribal access and traditional collection of plants and firewood, off-highway vehicle recreation, hunting and fishing and authorized grazing. The monument designation also does not affect valid existing rights for oil, gas, and mining operations, military training operations, and utility corridors.
“The rock art, ancient dwellings, and ceremonial sites concealed within these breathtaking landscapes help tell the story of people who have stewarded these lands for hundreds of generations,” said Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. “Today’s action builds on an extraordinary effort from tribes, local communities, and members of Congress to ensure that these treasures are protected for generations to come, so that tribes may continue to use and care for these lands, and all may have an opportunity to enjoy their beauty and learn from their rich cultural history.”
This action reflects the Obama’s profound record on conservation and is also in accordance with his actions to elevate the voices of Native people. Five sovereign tribal nations petitioned to have this irreplaceable land conserved.
“These monuments will preserve sacred lands and ancient treasures that hold deep meaning for us all, illuminating the history of some of the earliest civilizations on this continent,” said Bureau of Land Management director Neil Kornze. “Local collaboration is key to the successful management of these incredible landscapes, and the BLM is committed to continuing and expanding our work with community partners.”
After attempts to chip away at the law bill by bill, Utah Rep. Rob Bishop says he’d rather scrap the Endangered Species Act altogether.
The delta smelt, a tiny, silvery-blue fish hanging on for survival in California’s San Francisco Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin estuary, is notorious among opponents of the Endangered Species Act. Efforts to help the smelt have contributed to farm closures, and water reductions for households and businesses, letting more water flow towards the smelt’s habitat. And yet since 1993, when the fish was listed as threatened, the smelt has only slid further toward extinction, making it an oft-cited example of how the ESA doesn’t work for people or fish, wildlife and plants.
Utah Congressman Rob Bishop is one of the House Republicans who has backed a bill to increase water storage in California and weaken protections for the smelt — prioritizing “people over ideology,” Bishop wrote last year. As chair of the House Resources Committee, Bishop has become a leader of a radical, anti-environmental movement in Congress. Their agenda includes transferring public lands from federal management to states and local governments, banning the creation of national monuments, and removing protections for existing monuments.
Bishop is even setting sights on bedrock environmental laws, leading a charge to completely repeal the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Since 1973, the ESA has enabled the federal government to recognize species as “threatened” or “endangered,” and to set rules and restrictions on human activity to protect and recover at-risk wildlife, fish, insects and plants. The act is considered a global beacon for preventing extinction, and environmentalists insist that the ESA rarely blocks development.
“What is it about the desert?”
“For me, it’s always been the wide open spaces. You know, you’re very small, and so therefore any problems that you might have also feel really small. And so it’s really a place to put things in perspective,” park ranger Liz Ballenger said. “It’s restorative.”
But there are times when even the desert needs to be restored. The arches and cliffs haven’t gone anywhere, but after more than a century of cattle-trampling, beginning in the mid-1800s, vast stretches of land in the West still haven’t come back. Native grass doesn’t grow and wildlife can’t survive.
That’s why Canyonlands and Arches National Parks are involved in an innovative program using something called “con-mods.” “It’s short for connectivity modifier,” Ballenger explained.
It’s a big idea with lots of little parts: the X-shaped con-mods catch seeds and moisture, creating tiny “islands of recovery” that multiply over and over.
“We’re in Salt Valley [in Arches] now … one of the areas that’s really in need of restoration,” Ballenger said. “By having these islands of recovery out here on the landscape, we’re able to get perennial grass established into these systems again.”
So far, scientists say con-mods have a 90 percent success rate.
Last month, temperatures in the high Arctic spiked dramatically, some 36 degrees Fahrenheit above normal — a move that corresponded with record low levels of Arctic sea ice during a time of year when this ice is supposed to be expanding during the freezing polar night.
And now this week we’re seeing another huge burst of Arctic warmth. A buoy close to the North Pole just reported temperatures close to the freezing point of 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 Celsius), which is 10s of degrees warmer than normal for this time of year. Although it isn’t clear yet, we could now be in for another period when sea ice either pauses its spread across the Arctic ocean, or reverses course entirely.
But these bursts of Arctic warmth don’t stand alone — last month, extremely warm North Pole temperatures corresponded with extremely cold temperatures over Siberia. This week, meanwhile, there are large bursts of un-seasonally cold air over Alaska and Siberia once again.
It is all looking rather consistent with an outlook that has been dubbed “Warm Arctic, Cold Continents” — a notion that remains scientifically contentious but, if accurate, is deeply consequential for how climate change could unfold in the Northern Hemisphere winter.
While flashing back to an impossibly busy summer, Kathleen Gonder describes Bryce Canyon National Park as if it had been under siege: “We’re scrambling just to be able to provide infrastructure — and that means the basics, like clean restrooms and parking,” said Gonder, who is chief of interpretation at the Utah park famous for its colorful, spike-like geological formations called hoodoos.
At 56 square miles, Bryce Canyon is among the smallest of the national parks, but it currently ranks 11th in visitation. More than 2.3 million people, and counting, have flocked to the park. Sixty percent of that traffic happened between June and September.
Bryce Canyon certainly was not alone. Its yearlong 100th birthday celebration exposed the National Park Service — at least major, visible parts of it — as a system bursting at the seams.
The agency’s 59 parks, which include national gems like Zion and Acadia, in Maine, are ahead of last year’s pace by 6.5 million visits, the equivalent of the population of Indiana. Thirteen of those parks already are over the 2 million mark in visitation.
Five national parks — Yosemite, Zion, Bryce Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains, and Glacier – have experienced increases of at least 500,000 visitors more than last year’s totals, according to preliminary figures.
But such problems are a product partly of the Park Service’s making. The immense marketing push of the centennial celebrations were helped by an improving U.S. economy, and a period of lower gas prices. The increased visitation, combined with a mounting deferred maintenance ledger now up to about $12 billion, has stressed Park Service infrastructure and staffing. The question will be whether 2016 was an anomaly or a semi-permanent shift for which the National Park Service needs to contemplate dramatic measures.
What falls through the cracks when a park is under siege by dramatically increased visitation? Bryce Canyon’s Kathleen Gonder was quick to answer: “The quality of the experience.”
President Obama and his top aides, who have ushered through an increasingly ambitious set of energy and environmental policies during his second term, have decided to flood the zone during his remaining month in office. For months, they had envisioned finalizing a set of regulations and other executive actions that would set the stage for Hillary Clinton’s presidency; now they face the prospect of a Republican successor who has vowed to revive the U.S. fossil fuel industry and eliminate two regulations for every one he adopts.
In many cases, that means exerting every federal lever still available to promote renewable energy, restrict drilling and coal extraction, and safeguard a handful of prized landscapes in the western United States.
The administration finalized a rule aimed at curbing accidental methane releases from oil and gas drilling on federal and tribal lands. Officials estimate the new methane rule—which compels reductions in gas flaring, more leak inspections, and the installation of new equipment in some operations—will cut annual emissions of the heat-trapping gas by 175,000 to 180,000 tons.
Just two days ago, it issued an indefinite plan for offshore oil and gas drilling that halts such decisions in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas off Alaska, as well as in waters off the southeast Atlantic Coast.
On the other side of the ledger, the Interior Department finalized a rule just two days after the election that aims to expand wind and solar development on Bureau of Land Management–owned land by streamlining the permitting process and providing financial incentives for firms to bid on areas that have the best potential for generation capacity and the fewest conflicts with imperiled species.
The incoming Trump administration appears determined to reverse much of what President Obama has tried to achieve on climate and environment policy.
In position papers, agency questionnaires and the résumés of incoming senior officials, the direction is clear — an about-face from eight years of policies designed to reduce climate-altering emissions and address the effects of a warming planet. The Republican-led Congress appears to welcome many of these changes.
But mayors and governors — many of them in states that supported President-elect Donald J. Trump — say they are equally determined to continue the policies and plans they have already adopted to address climate change and related environmental damage, regardless of what they see from Washington.
In last month’s election, Seattle, Los Angeles and Columbus, Ohio, voted to expand mass transit. Portland, Ore., which many say is the most environmentally minded city in the country, began a new municipal waste program a few years ago, resulting in higher recycling and composting rates, and smaller amounts of trash headed to landfills. Miami Beach is raising roadbeds and building flood walls to hold back the rising seas.
California, led by the Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, has adopted a cap-and-trade program, which limits carbon dioxide emissions and sets up a market for companies to buy and sell carbon allowances. The state has set one of the nation’s most ambitious climate targets — to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. Hawaii is planning to use 100 percent renewable energy by 2045.
President Barack Obama on Dec. 20, 2016 moved to indefinitely block drilling in vast swaths of U.S. waters. The president had been expected to take the action by invoking a provision in a 1953 law that governs offshore leases.
The law allows a president to withdraw any currently unleased lands in the Outer Continental Shelf from future lease sales. There is no provision in the law that allows the executive’s successor to repeal the decision, so President-elect Donald Trump would not be able to easily brush aside the action.
The lands covered include the bulk of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas in the Arctic and 31 underwater canyons in the Atlantic. The United States and Canada also announced they will identify sustainable shipping lanes through their connected Arctic waters.
Canada also imposed a five-year ban on all oil and gas drilling licensing in the Canadian Arctic. The moratorium will be reviewed every five years. “These actions, and Canada’s parallel actions, protect a sensitive and unique ecosystem that is unlike any other region on earth,” Obama said in a statement.
“They reflect the scientific assessment that, even with the high safety standards that both our countries have put in place, the risks of an oil spill in this region are significant and our ability to clean up from a spill in the region’s harsh conditions is limited.”
The action potentially tees up a battle that touches on hot-button issues: environmental protection, energy independence, climate change, and the scope of executive power.
The U.S. Interior Department on Dec. 19, 2016 finalized a contentious rule to protect streams and forests from the impact of coal mining, one of the Obama administration’s last major environmental regulations that the incoming Trump administration is likely to target.
The Stream Protection Rule, which the coal industry strongly opposes, updates 33-year-old regulations with stronger requirements for responsible surface coal mining. The Interior Department says the rule will protect 6,000 miles of streams and 52,000 acres of forests over the next two decades.
“This updated, scientifically modern rule will make life better for a countless number of Americans who live near places where coal is being mined,” said Joseph Pizarchik, director of the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, which crafted the rule. Pizarchik said his office received over 150,000 public comments on the proposal.
The Stream Protection rule requires companies to avoid mining practices that could pollute streams and drinking water sources, restore streams, and promise to return mined areas to their original form. It also requires mining companies to replant these areas with native trees and vegetation in certain cases.
The rule also requires testing and monitoring of streams near coal mines before, during and after drilling to ensure that miners can detect increased levels of pollution.
Industry groups like the National Mining Association have been vocal opponents of the proposal, saying it places too much of a burden on mining companies.
On July 1, 2017, Canada turns 150 years old. Kicking off the festivities on New Year’s Day, the stewards of the country’s protected natural treasures, Parks Canada, has a gift for all: a free, multiuse pass to the country’s 47 national parks and national park reserves.
Parks and reserves, which indicate areas earmarked as national parks pending native land claim settlements, are located in every one of the country’s 13 provinces and territories from coast to coast to coast (Pacific to Atlantic to Arctic).
The Discovery Pass also offers free access to 171 national historic sites and national marine conservation areas. By the way, it’s the 100th anniversary of the parks agency (America’s National Park Service turned 100 in 2016).
Entry to Canada’s national parks usually costs around $7 per person. With the free pass, what things will you still have to pay for? Extra activities, such as tours or parking, normally require a separate fee. Camping costs also aren’t included.
The free Discovery Card is good from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 2017. You order it online, hang it on your car’s rear-view mirror and show up at the park gate.
Scientists at institutions in the United States and Australia published a set of unprecedented ocean observations near the largest glacier of the largest ice sheet in the world: Totten glacier, East Antarctica. And the result was a troubling confirmation of what scientists already feared — Totten is melting from below.
The measurements, sampling ocean temperatures in seas over a kilometer (0.62 miles) deep in some places right at the edge of Totten glacier’s floating ice shelf, affirmed that warm ocean water is flowing in towards the glacier at the rate of 220,000 cubic meters per second.
These waters, the paper asserts, are causing the ice shelf to lose between 63 and 80 billion tons of its mass to the ocean per year, and to lose about 10 meters (32 feet) of thickness annually, a reduction that has been previously noted based on satellite measurements.
This matters because more of East Antarctica flows out towards the sea through the Totten glacier region than for any other glacier in the entirety of the East Antarctic ice sheet. Its entire “catchment,” or the region of ice that slowly flows outward through Totten glacier and its ice shelf, is larger than California. If all of this ice were to end up in the ocean somehow, seas would raise by about 11.5 feet.
The U.S. solar industry just experienced a quarter of record-breaking growth, with 4,143 megawatts of solar capacity added between July and September. That’s a 99 percent increase over the previous quarter, and a 191 percent increase over the same time period last year.
Those numbers come from a quarterly report issued by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and market analysis firm GTM Research. According to the report, an average of one new megawatt of solar generating capacity came online every 32 minutes between July and September. From the beginning of the year through September, new solar capacity represented 39 percent of all new electric generating capacity in the United States — second only to natural gas in terms of the share of new electric capacity.
Recent gains in the industry seem poised to continue: The report notes that the fourth quarter of the year is on pace to break the record-setting growth of the third quarter. Some of the boom can be attributed to uncertainty surrounding key federal tax credits supporting solar, which were set to expire in 2017. Companies looking to capitalize on these credits tried hard to push through solar projects in 2016 — but with Congress choosing to extend the tax credit, companies can now push some projects into 2017 or later.
And those gains, according to SEIA’s Kimbis, are likely to continue even after President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Trump has filled several top cabinet positions with people tied to the fossil fuel industry, and has promised to end federal spending on renewable energy research. But as long as federal tax credits for solar remain in place — something that passed with bipartisan support the last time it came up in Congress — the solar industry expects that market forces and state-level policies will have a larger effect on solar growth than federal policy.
National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis will be in South Carolina Thursday, December 15, 2016 at the invitation of U.S. Representative James E. Clyburn (D-SC) to hear comments on proposals to add Reconstruction Era sites in Beaufort County to the National Park System.
The Reconstruction Era began during the Civil War and lasted until the dawn of Jim Crow racial segregation in the 1890s and remains one of the most complicated and poorly understood periods in American History. During this period in the Beaufort area, some of the first African American soldiers were enlisted in the U.S. Army, the first African American schools were founded, early efforts to distribute land to former slaves took place, and many of the era’s most significant African American politicians came to prominence.
Local community leaders and elected officials including Congressman Clyburn are proposing that five sites in Beaufort County be included in the National Park System. Congressman Clyburn introduced model legislation on May 26, 2016, to establish the Penn School – Reconstruction Era National Monument.
Director Jarvis will join local leaders for a visit to Penn Center, Brick Baptist Church, and other historic sites from the Reconstruction Era in the area. A local historian and representatives from each of the sites under consideration will provide background and historic information regarding each of the sites.
Bus Tour: 09:30 AM – 11:45 AM Penn Center, 16 Penn Circle West, St. Helena Island, SC
Public Meeting: 12:00 P.M – 2:00 P.M. Brick Baptist Church, 85 Martin Luther King Drive, St. Helena Island, SC.
The world’s air conditioner is on the fritz. Unprecedented, record-breaking warmth in the Arctic this year triggered declines in sea ice, snow, the Greenland ice sheet and a remarkable delay in the annual freeze of sea ice in the fall. Overall, the Arctic experienced its warmest year ever recorded.
“Rarely have we seen the Arctic show a clearer, stronger or more pronounced signal of persistent warming and its cascading effects on the environment than this year,” said Jeremy Mathis, director of NOAA’s Arctic research program, which released its annual Arctic Report Card on December 13, 2016.
Even more worrisome: The trends are deepening and show no signs of letting up anytime soon. “All signs point to continuing on this trajectory,” Mathis said.
Changes in Arctic climate have now seeped into the winter months, instead of just the summer, Mathis said. “It’s not just the loss of sea ice in the summer, it’s year-round now,” he said.
New research also suggests polar bear numbers are dwindling as the Arctic sea ice melts, and their population could drop by a third over the next 35 years.
I am Jeff Clark, founder of Internet Brothers, producer of this blog, and passionate about hiking. I live in Western NC near the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains. Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests are just out my door, so the content will focus on these areas, but let me know what you would like to see on the site. 
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