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Tom Black

The Geomorphic Road Assessment and Inventory Package (GRAIP) is a process and a set of tools for analyzing the impacts of roads on forested watersheds. GRAIP combines a road inventory with a powerful GIS analysis tool set to predict sediment production and delivery, mass wasting risk from gullies and landslides, stream diversion potential, culvert maintenance, and fish passage at stream crossings. The road inventory protocol describes how to systematically field inventory a road system using GPS and automated data forms. Once downloaded, these data can be immediately run through a data quality checking and correction program. Quality checked data can then be analyzed in a program implemented in ARC-GIS. The program...
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A New Model of Watershed-scale Aquatic Monitoring from the Crown of the Continent: Quantifying the Benefits of Watershed Restoration in the Face of Climate Change
This project will support the design and development of a large-scale aquatics monitoring program across 1.5 million acres of the Crown of the Continent, as part of a 10-year, landscape-level restoration project established and funded by the U.S. Forest Service in 2010. The Forest Service has directed each of ten Cooperative Forest Landscape Restoration Program projects to develop and implement a large-scale monitoring program to inventory current resource conditions and facilitate the short- and long-term evaluation of the effectiveness of restoration projects to inform future management strategies and actions: the work proposed here would address significant challenges associated with maintaining or improving...
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Summary: Over the last several decades, tens of thousands of miles of simple dirt and gravel roads have been built across forested public land in the United States. Today, managers from the U.S. Forest Service (and other federal and state agencies) have insufficient funding to maintain these roads and have been directed to begin strategically reducing road densities, despite a lack of public support in many regions. When roads are removed or stored, it is often difficult to show that these restoration treatments are cost effective and/or improve aquatic process and function at either site- or watershed-scales. Resolving these issues has become an increasingly urgent matter for managers across the western United...
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A New Model of Watershed-scale Aquatic Monitoring from the Crown of the Continent: Quantifying the Benefits of Watershed Restoration in the Face of Climate Change
This project will support the design and development of a large-scale aquatics monitoring program across 1.5 million acres of the Crown of the Continent, as part of a 10-year, landscape-level restoration project established and funded by the U.S. Forest Service in 2010. The Forest Service has directed each of ten Cooperative Forest Landscape Restoration Program projects to develop and implement a large-scale monitoring program to inventory current resource conditions and facilitate the short- and long-term evaluation of the effectiveness of restoration projects to inform future management strategies and actions: the work proposed here would address significant challenges associated with maintaining or improving...
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