Ways to Get Involved

My hope is that from reading the success that Polk County Conservation has experienced inspires others to get involved and make a change. As a Wildlife Biologist, it inspires me to see change actually happening via staff who have a passion for their job as well as adequate funding resources. In my current position, funding is often limited and purchase methods seem to be more cost prohibitive than productive. I understand some of this is going through the 'red tape', but I also look forward to advancing my career in the future to areas that have adequate funding.

As such, I wanted to provide resources for people who wanted to get involved with Polk County Conservation.

Volunteering

Polk County Conservation (PCC) has all sorts of opportunities for people to get involved. Prior to doing so, you must fill out a volunteer application. They also ask that everyone reads, signs, and adheres to the volunteer Code of Conduct. This is important to ensure that certain standards are met to allow all involved to have a positive, safe, and learning-conducive time. 

PCC publishes what appears to be a quarterly Volunteer Calendar, describing opportunities you have to get involved so you can plan well ahead of time. Two of the things on their current calendar - invasive species removal and seed harvest are components of ecological restoration that I have become passionate about. I am working extensively to remove invasive species at my current place of work as well as implement a grassland restoration project to restore some of Virginia's native prairies back to their former glory. These are two programs with Polk County I would definitely encourage anyone who is interested to get involved with. Many, MANY hands are needed for both of these assignments, your efforts will always be needed. 

PCC also has public volunteers days (2x/month) where the public can come out and make a difference on one of the other projects PCC has going on. These projects range from trash pick up to trail maintenance, waterway cleanup and more! They also offer Private conservation events - I'm curious myself on what this entails!

Adopt a Park - PCC has several parks available that volunteers can 'adopt', conducting work day events throughout the year as needed. Bird boxes, clean-up events, trail maintenance and other beautification projects are among the list of many things you can get involved with. For more info, see their Adopt-a-park Flyer!

There are plenty of volunteer opportunities with PCC to do nearly any conservation related project you can think of. They even seem to be open to creative projects as well, so feel free to suggest your own. It seems as though they have tons of work, so don't be discouraged if your idea isn't utilized just yet. As conservation professionals, they too have goals they would like to meet annually related to their personal and professional goals.

They also have an 'Events' component with their program. These seem to be more geared towards fun, outdoors events rather than projects. While projects have their place, sometimes we just need to connect with the outdoors and just be. They have several hiking events, with one that looks enticing just because of it's name and photo associated with it: Hike and Hot Cococa. For more information on Events, please go to their Events page. Events due require registration prior to attending. Likely this is due for planning purposes. Planning ahead of time will allow an adequate staff to volunteer ratio, allow staff to provide proper equipment for everyone, and to also ensure that too many people don't sign up for one task. While that seems slightly silly, there are many areas of need and spreading the wealth of volunteers is extremely beneficial to conservation professionals. 

For those looking for less 'hands on' physical labor type volunteer opportunities, Jester Park is the place for you! There is a need for all sorts of volunteers, one is not greater than the other. Jester Park has volunteer opportunities to help greet visitors, provide information similar to that above with events and programs going on, and directing people to trails. For more information about Jester Park volunteer opportunities, please click here.

If you have questions/concerns/comments with any of the volunteer opportunities, the best contact would be to e-mail ConservationVolunteers@polkcountyiowa.gov. They will be able to respond to whatever inquiries you may bring.

I hope this provides anyone interested with resources to get them started on volunteering with Polk County Conservation. They are doing great things in the area and I hope to be a part of the volunteering someday myself!  

Creating a a mobile app

For this assignment, I was tasked with learning how to build a mobile app via MIT's App Inventor Interface. We weren't necessarily tasked with create an app that was directly related to our watershed (as that would require extensive involvement into a pseudo-programming atmosphere), but we were to experiment with a few app tutorials and try a basic app.

As an avid fan of mini golf, I chose to do the mini golf application tutorial (initially the ball bounce tutorial). The video was very short, and gave the basic information, but I decided to go a little deeper into the more in depth tutorial on the mini golf app to see what that entailed.

A quick disclaimer: I had lots of difficult setting up the emulator (required if you don't have an android phone that can download MITs aiStarter). It seemed it didn't worked right at the beginning, but restarting my computer seemed to help.

The programming interface was relatively intuitive. I took a basic programming course in high school and thoroughly enjoyed it. For whatever reason, that's as far as I took it, and never continued with programming. As a professional, I use microsoft excel and formulas within excel quite extensively. I also recently took a Microsoft Access course for database management but I don't think I will be learning to program access in any amount of depth - it is very involved, people spend years learning access. I've also started to learn R for data management, but that may be another that I don't get too involved in. I like R for it's ability to replicate manipulation of data. For example, if I needed to perform an annual accounting document from a license sales file, with proper R code, I can spit out a report with the relevant data I need from a larger dataset with just a click of a button, rather than recoding it every time in excel.

Back to the MIT App Inventor

So I was able to replicate the minigolf game through the first 3 steps (it's basically just following along a PDF guide). I mostly had success, with some minor errors that I couldn't figure out. Below is the game with the mobile emulator (right) and the programming on the left.

I thought the programming side of things was relatively easy to replicate, however more time would be needed (maybe a semester long course, or lots of spare time) in order to be able to successfully create my own app from scratch. It does seem intuitive, but that's also because I was just replicating their example. I think to learn this well, one would need to do each of their examples to their full extent, as I'd imagine they cover each of the "Components" throughout those tutorials. 

Occasionally, the PC emulator wouldn't incorporate the changes I made on the programming side, so I would have to just shut it and reconnect via the website and it worked fine.

Thinking about the simplicity of this app but the amount of 'programming' required - mainly just lines of nested code - I'd imagine it would be extremely time consuming to make an app that had multiple purposes.

Wetland Mitigation Banking

Wetland Mitigation Banking

First, a little background:

In 1948, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act was established, paving way for the establishment of the Clean Water Act (CWA) in 1972 by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Essentially, the CWA sets regulations for water quality by regulating pollution discharges into waterways such as sewage and fertilizers, wetland take, and clean water standards. As it relates to wetland mitigation (and subsequently mitigation banking), the CWA has a provision - Section 404 - that establishes regulations for the discharge of dredge material to fill wetlands that would otherwise be unavoidable, this includes any sort of damage/alteration of the quality of the wetland as well. Evidence has to be provided by the organization requesting the 404 permit showing that 1) steps have been taken to avoid impacts to wetlands/waterways, 2) potential impacts have been minimized, and 3) all unavoidable impacts will be compensated. These applications are reviewed by the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). General permits exist - those resulting in smaller impacts (minor road maintenance, utility rights of way) some of which can be used through statewide programs. More information on these specific matters can be obtained on the USACE website.

Wetland Mitigation is the compensation for the destruction of wetlands (as permitted by the CWA as discussed above). This facilitates an 'offset' of the loss of wetlands by restoring, creating, or enhancing wetlands, resulting in a 'no net loss' of wetlands. While that sounds all well and good, at times, this is fatal for certain species, especially those that breed in ephemeral wetlands. I'm unsure of the exact requirements, but I from conversations I have had, I do not believe that these wetlands are required to be 'mitigated' within the same general area.

With wetland mitigation banking, credits can be purchased to offset adverse wetland impacts from an organization. Often, sponsors design, create, establish and maintain wetland mitigation banks, then sell these 'credits' to organizations looking to offset wetland destruction (take). There are a finite number of credits per 'bank'; once these credits have all been purchased, this bank can no longer be used to offset wetland take. This can be extremely advantageous in that in an area such as Fourmile Creek (see video below), sponsors and conservation groups can work together to establish wetland mitigation banks for their own purposes: in this case, restoring the Fourmile Creek Watershed by creating wetlands along the creek, which then help reduce the adverse impact flooding events have. In this situation, Polk County Conservation and JEO are working together to restore stream flows to their native directions (oxbow restoration) and restore native vegetation to the area. While I don't have experience these types of projects, this does seem like an excellent way to handle wetland restoration in that it allows managers to determine what the need is and establish effective plans proactively rather than retroactively. I'm unsure of the timeline companies have to mitigate wetlands in the event banks don't exist. Mitigation facilitates this, possibly making timelines more rapid, but also providing an immediate solution for the needs of conservation groups.

JEO Consulting Group, an engineering firm conducted a stream assessment for the Fourmile Creek Watershed, also creating a simulation video of what a portion of the stream would look like with wetland mitigation banking.

For more information on wetland mitigation banking, see NRCS: Mitigation Banking.

Additionally, NRCS has created a story map that explains more on Wetland Mitigation Banking.

Sources:

EPA Clean Water Act Summary: https://www.epa.gov/laws-regulations/summary-clean-water-act
EPA Clean Water Act, Section 404: https://www.epa.gov/cwa-404/permit-program-under-cwa-section-404#:~:text=Section%20404%20of%20the%20Clean%20Water%20Act%20(CWA)%20establishes%20a,the%20United%20States%2C%20including%20wetlands.&text=Proposed%20activities%20are%20regulated%20through,required%20for%20potentially%20significant%20impacts.

USDA NRCS Wetland Mitigation Press Release: https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/ia/newsroom/releases/NRCSEPRD1330430/

USDA NRCS Conservation Compliance and Wetland Mitigation Banking
https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/national/programs/farmbill/?cid=NRCSEPRD362686

United States Army Corps of Engineers:
https://www.mvr.usace.army.mil/Portals/48/docs/regulatory/mitigation/Iowa%20Mitigation%20Banking%20Guidance%20Package_reduced.pdf

US EPA - Wetlands
https://www.epa.gov/wetlands/wetlands-restoration-definitions-and-distinctions