It's dumping!

Trying to keep the road open, Jeff spend 9 hours on the tractor yesterday. But this morning new snow & wind had obliterated his efforts. It's a good thing--next year's water supply was looking pretty dismal with the unusually dry & cold early season.

Visits to the station for the foreseeable future will involve parking at the highway, so give a call to arrange a snow vehicle shuttle into the station before arrival. If you're a little fuzzy on how visits to the station work after the thick white arrives, watch this video to get a personal tour.

Sagehen researcher Brett Elderd has some great recent publications credits from his thesis work on the downstream effects of dams:

1. Comparing the direct and community-mediated effects of
disturbance on plant population dynamics: flooding, herbivory
and Mimulus guttatus
Author(s): Elderd BD, Doak DF
Source: JOURNAL OF ECOLOGY 94 (3): 656-669 MAY 2006

2.Disturbance-mediated trophic interactions and plant performance
Author(s): Elderd BD
Source: OECOLOGIA 147 (2): 261-271 MAR 2006

3.The impact of changing flow regimes on riparian vegetation
and the riparian species Mimulus guttatus
Author(s): Elderd BD
Source: ECOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS 13 (6): 1610-1625 DEC 2003

We're having technical difficulties this week. The phone company came out & replaced some ragged sections of the line, so the phones are back up, but our internet connection is out. A cable fitting was improperly installed & it finally corroded away. We're waiting for a technician to come swap out the bad fitting, so give a call if you don't get a prompt response to e-mail this week.

Jeff repaired the burst tractor hydraulic hose, so the road is much better than it was after the storm. You can drive a low clearance vehicle in, but higher clearance is always better.

We just had a great visit from the Lake Tahoe school kids. They spent 3 days at Sagehen learning about mapping, data collection, animals & other basin ecology. Truckee teachers met with the Lake Tahoe instructors to talk about the program & it now appears that some local school kid programs that have been travelling to the coasts will be shifting visits to Sagehen as well.

Our "Sagehen TV" video program is becoming a big success, proving a very useful tool in ways we hadn't anticipated.

The videos we produce are often mini-documentaries about ongoing research at Sagehen. For example, we have programs on the bear-collaring efforts this past summer & the slave-raiding ants soon to be featured in a National Geographic photo-article. Making these videos available for download or podcast on our web-site offers the general public a way to catch a glimpse into the work here. Sagehen stock video footage is also used by other organizations that reach a broader audience, like the Bay Area ABC-TV affiliate & local NGOs like the Truckee River Watershed Council.

But we are also finding that passing out DVDs enables various projects to integrate better. For instance, the Keck Hydrowatch technical folks use these videos to get an idea about how field biologists work, what their needs are, & how to design better remote sensing networks to help get the job done. Video on bear research has being used in biologist training & field performance self-evaluation.

Sagehen programming airs on the local television station in Truckee, appearing in the prime time slots Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday. Along with the documentaries, we also tape & broadcast highlights of our Summer Speaker Series, so that these great presentations can reach moe of the community.

In the coming months, we will be experimenting with short content delivery via YouTube & other syndication web-sites. this should help resolve technical formatting issues that can be challenging to address alone.