Final Blog Post

Natural Resource Conservation Course NRM 12 at Santa Rosa Junior College

With increasing human pressure and a growing need to balance competing demands, we need new and better ways to manage society’s impacts on the environment. The natural resources management (NRM) program prepares students for careers requiring an understanding of the social, economic, biological, and physical aspects of solving problems associated with the management of natural resources for their highest and best uses for society while maintaining the integrity of life-sustaining ecological systems

The NRM course is part of the classes for your Natural Resource Sciences at Santa Rosa Junior College. The course is a management-oriented, interdisciplinary course that integrates the social, economic, physical, and biological aspects of natural resources. The course draws upon the courses and resources across the various colleges at the JC. An undergraduate program leading to a Bachelor of Science, a graduate program leading to a Master of Science, a doctoral program leading to a Doctor of Philosophy, as well as a professional degree program, called a Master of Natural Resources Management are available to continue to study in.

In looking at the syllabus, the topics covered in this class I recommend to continue in the NRM 12 on-line courses should be the same subjects as what we have covered in class. Those subjects are as follows:

1.  Evaluate and prioritize sustainable management principles for forests and other natural resources. 

2.  Recommend sustainable uses of wood, water, forage, recreation and wilderness resources. 

3.  Summarize and discuss contemporary issues affecting the management and preservation of the nation's renewable natural resources for future generations. 

I highly recommend the subject on water conservation and sustainability in our local areas. I don’t want to remove anything as I have learned so much in this class. 

Examples which I can use to apply in my everyday life is being more sustainable in recycling and renewing certain products at home more than I would normally. I’m able to conserve more in my environment with my parents as we are watching our energy usage and how we are doing things to help with sustaining the environment.

Through the NRM course, students acquire a broad background in natural resources, as well as in-depth study in one or two emphasis areas of interest. The course exposes students to many disciplines—exactly the interdisciplinary approach society must take if it is to find solutions to complex environmental problems. I would see this as a future program to an Associate degree in the future.

The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises

The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century’s Sustainability Crises

How do issues related to people, water, power, nutrition and environment impact each other? What can we do without making the others worse to tackle one problem?

The Post Carbon Reader presents reflections on the key issues defining our new century from renewable energy and urban agriculture to social justice and collective resilience by some of the world's most influential thinkers. Here is a chapter out of the book Post Carbon Reader that talks about ways to be resilience:

RESILIENCE: Personal Preparation by Chris Martenson

How to make sense of the challenges that society is facing now. What are the systemic underlying forces at stake? What brought us here? It is like placing a band-aid on a life-threatening injury to act without this understanding.

How to establish resilience in the family. While we also need to behave as national and global citizens in our individual lives, building our societies ' resilience is an integral response to the numerous sustainability crises of the 21st century.

Resilience: Personal Preparation by Chris Martenson is meant for anyone, everywhere, who is worried about the unstable course that society is on and who wants to understand better why we are here and what we can do about it. Participants included entirely new people and people who have been studying these issues for decades.

To start with, a sustainability project is about creating and maintaining a change you can be inspired and excited about in your life.   Climate change conferences have encouraged the international community to take action over the past few years. 

To keep it simple, a green lifestyle is about choosing and taking eco acts and can be classified in different areas of our lives.

• Natural resource protection: begin by rethinking energy and water consumption patterns and finding ways to curb excessive consumption.

• Reduce waste: start with the elimination of food waste.  Preplanning your meals, ordering in bulk, and storing what you need.  Compost and make healthy soil for your old food.

• Purchase products with an eco-conscious mind.  Buy products with minimal packaging or sustainable packaging.

• More environmental value is offered by products that can be reused before recycling. 

• Buy local produce, purchase fair trade and buy items from green companies. 

• Inspire others: take a green stance.

How can you go from information to personal action to the next step?  Here is where the tried and true adage applies: "What is calculated is handled." While more commonly articulated in a business setting, it also refers to our personal lives.  For example, you need to know how much you weigh to benchmark your success if you want to lose weight. Similarly, you first need to learn the areas of your environmental impacts in order to measure your progress in living a sustainable lifestyle.

The Secret Life of Mountain Lions

https://www.wildfutures.us/video--the-secret-life-of-mountain-lions.html


I just watched "Mountain Lions ' Secret Life."  A true picture of this beautiful cat is the bonds between mother and kittens, a father's relationship with his family, and the struggle for survival in a harsh environment. The clip will reach many minds, and many will be as saddened as I am that the state is not offering these animals further protection.

Not only are mountain lions magnificent creatures, they also play an important role in maintaining healthy ecosystems.

WildFutures aims to shift negative perceptions and promote peaceful coexistence between humans and animals through the influence of awareness, news, and the best available research.

• Prevent the imperilation of species and their environments.
• Ensure endangered species and their ecosystems.
• Protect the protection and environment of vulnerable species.

Could we comfortably coexist with mountain lions and go on with our own lives? A resounding yes is the resolution! —In fact, millions of us are already doing that. Given other people's close proximity to such big, wild cats, disputes are extremely rare between us.

Resources

There are a multitude of creative solutions that take a non-lethal approach to resolving human-wildlife conflicts. To learn about some of these programs, click on the links below.
​

• Mountain Lion Foundation
• People and Carnivores
• Bears and People
• Project Coyote
• Defenders of Wildlife 
• Wood River Wolf Project
• Adrian Treve’s Carnivore Coexistence Lab

Seeing the Forest

Seeing the Forest

Here is the link to David Bollier’s review of Seeing the Forest https://vimeo.com/125160364

Almost half of the world’s original forests have been cleared or degraded. So naturally, most people think of the “forest restoration” movement as an effort to re-plant these lost trees.

But it’s time to see restoration as more than just the trees.

Restoration is really about improving landscapes throughout the world that are deforested, degraded, or underutilized. Boosting the productivity of these landscapes helps take pressure off the world’s remaining forests while also providing a host of tangible benefits—from food security to clean water to carbon sequestration.

"Seeing the Forest" tells the story of how the Siuslaw became a restoration forest that successfully manages ecosystems while putting people to work. This 30-minute documentary film features partners, Forest Service staff and leadership, and Jim Furnish, past Siuslaw Forest Supervisor and retired Deputy Chief of the USFS, describing how the forest navigated the last several decades of changing federal forest practices in collaboration with a wide range of partners.

The Siuslaw National Forest and its partners began working with community members to restore the natural functions of the estuary to the benefit of the salmon, plants, birds, animals and people who call it home. Last week construction begins on an interpretive site north of Lincoln City that will help visitors and residents better understand the estuary’s significance and impact.

Residential and commercial development in the mid 1900s impacted the intertidal portion of the estuary. For more than 40 years the Siuslaw National Forest, with a diverse range of partners, has been acquiring tidal marsh in the estuary in order to bring back the tides. The estuary was restored incrementally from 1978 through 2017. Nearly the entire estuary is now restored to a natural, historic tidal regime, resulting in significant fisheries response and native biodiversity.

We're returning natural functions to altered landscapes, focusing on creating and maintaining healthy ecosystems: estuaries, old growth forests, meadows, coastal dunes. We are working to repair whole watersheds, across river basins, from ridge-top to the ocean.

Once widespread old growth forest, coastal meadow and estuary habitats steadily disappeared, converted to other uses, leading to ‘threatened and endangered listing’ of several species, including Northern spotted owl, marbled murrelet, coho salmon, snowy plover and silverspot butterfly.

Watersheds and ecosystems cover large areas, spanning many different land ownerships. Effective restoration must be a coordinated, cooperative effort, engaging neighbors to address habitat problems together. The complexity, size and expense of this type of restoration are beyond the capacity of any one person or organization.

Partnerships are key to this effort. Unprecedented agreements between agencies, universities and community members emerged to implement the work of restoration. Scientific research, technical expertise and collaboration ingenuity can produce a new model of restoration that will benefit ecosystems and communities for years to come.

The Siuslaw Watershed Council supports sound economic, social and environmental uses of natural and human resources in the Siuslaw River Basin. The Council encourages cooperation among public and private watershed entities to promote awareness and understanding of watershed functions by adopting and implementing a total watershed approach to natural resource management and production.

Life Cycle of the Salmon

Life Cycle of Salmon

Salmon are one of the few fish species which can live in salt and freshwater. They spend their juvenile lives in rivers, then migrate to the sea and return later to the place they were born. - The migration to the spawning habitat may commence up to a year before spawning takes place in autumn or winter. The salmon ceases to feed to direct all their energy to reproduction. The fertilized eggs are covered with gravel to a depth of several centimeters by the female. The parents then leave the eggs in the nest, and there is no further parental care. The eggs will hatch after about 180 days at normal water temperatures in March or April.

The just-hatched fish, and still have a yolk sac attached to their bodies containing the remains of food supplied from the egg. When most of their yolk sac has been consumed, the fish become active and begin their journey up through the gravel.

This critical period exposes the young to dangerous predators for the first time. They will remember the stream and will return to spawn as their parents did and eventually die.

Russian River Restoration

The population of Coho in the Russian River was down to, from 100 fish, to a population of about 10. NOAA's involved in various restoration projects throughout the Russian River and the types of projects that we're involved in are fish passage, habitat restoration for in-stream complexity, riparian projects to reduce temperature, erosion control, and projects to reduce streamflow velocity. The flows are elevated seven times above the natural flow level on the main stem Russian River. And the flows in Dry Creek are also elevated because of the releases out of Warm Springs Dam to supply water supply to nearly half a million people in Marin and Sonoma counties. The demand for water can spread the flows with projects like these to reduce the velocities, which is important because that creates the ideal rearing habitat for Coho salmon.

The stream right now is running at about 200 cubic feet per second. When there are winter floods at the damn and the fish need to get out of the way of that high water the flow goes up to 3,000 or 4,000 cubic feet per second. That fills this channel behind, it's actually designed to backwater, so it fills from the downstream end up, so fish can enter, hold there when the flow is really high, and as the water recedes, they swim out without getting trapped. These habitat improvements will increase the number of fishes in the stream. Small tags are implanted in juvenile fish when they're at the hatchery or they're collected in the wild. This backwater channel has two antennas in it, those antennas just look like a loop of PVC pipe, they're designed to detect the fish that carry these small tags as they enter these habitat features in the winter time. Data are collected to when those fish that have been tagged are out in the main part of Dry Creek are coming and going from these habitat features. Data collection during the winter at Quivira, had hundreds of detections of fish coming and going from this habitat feature and they stay in it during these high flood events for up to a week at a time. So, it's an early indication that the fish are detecting and using these places There are Steelhead and Coho salmon that have been detected coming and going from this habitat feature so early indications are that it's working.