Reflections from LO Summit
Comments
Group 1: what to do with grey willow? while planning, create a long term detailed management plan, include adaptive management. propetual approval would help with adaptive management. operations and management plan potential deliverable. Develop a sample O&P plan with input from different groups on file to share with different groups. Describe habitat succession. Aerial flights could help.
Deliverables.
Group 2.
Integrate growers into monitoring.
Group 3.
Hydrology and vegetation are key indicators of success.
Funding oppertunity for long term monitoring is a challenge.
Project goals are important for shaping monitoring program.
Hydroperiod as a metric of success. Temporal dynamics
Sharing techniques and decisions.
Sharing sampling plot locations between groups.
SOPs.
Group 4. Function
knowing about the site 2 years in advance. sufficient pre restoration monitoring
stream channel where seeps are coming (i.e. cold brook).
how much seeps vs upwelling.
sampling plan. coordination between organizations. standards. sharing data. distribution sample sites based on location.
Group 6. Cranberry Growers
growers interested in participating. they know the land and have equipment and knowhow. Potential cost savings as a result.
The trick is permitting around agricultural exemptions could get them into trouble. So we need a set of guidance for what activities are permitted and when permit is needed. Certain regulations might need to change. Outreach to growers about all the above.
Topic 3: Habitat, vegetation, and ecosystem structure: • one gap, unresolved question, or future priority;
During Kennedy’s presentation, they mentioned the unexpected results of N increasing due to land changes beyond the restoration site. In our pilot work with soundscapes we also found that the acoustic activity was associated with the landscape context (edges and traffic surrounding the sites). Due to the pilot nature of the research, our soundscape work did not include control sites (unrestored abandoned bogs, active bogs, and natural wetlands). Including these may allow us to assess the influence of landscape context in restoration success. This information may help prioritize areas to be restored or working with communities to generate matrix landscapes that promote biodiversity within the restores sites.
• one opportunity for collaboration, shared data, or improved methods. I would love to interact with the teams working with vegetation structure. My work has a spatial landscape ecology lens and the use of remote sensing of vegetation productivity doesn’t reflect the actual vegetation structure and composition of the sites. We found no relationship between the soundscape acoustic complexity and vegetation productivity measured from remote sensing, when we expect higher complexity in heterogeneous habitats. I’m happy to share all sounds we collected – we are currently using BirdNet and SyNature for species identifications of birds and amphibians, to complement our soundscape analysis, however these are AI based and are limited by quality of labels and usually incomplete (specially for amphibians). I would love to collaborate with experts that could validate the AI classifications of sounds.