The Tennessee River Gorge Trust has recently established a water quality program to monitor perennial streams in the Gorge. TRGT will use this information to understand how we impact our water supply and the important role we play in water conservation.

Dave has finished his Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment. Here is the resulting map of the up-to-date ecological communities in the Tennessee River Gorge!

It's here! Dave Jacobs, our Climate Change Vulnerability Researcher, is finished with all the on-the-ground phases of his survey of ecological systems. He has created this beautiful map with his data that will be invaluable to the Trust's stewardship and acquisition decisions moving forward.

Dave has been hard at work in the field these past few months! The results of his efforts are represented in this map of his plot samplings. 

Researcher Dave Jacobs represented the Tennessee River Gorge Trust at the Association for Southern Biologists Annual Meeting held at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga last week.

Since May 2014 when Dave started his CCVA project, he's taken crash courses on topics ranging from ecological structure (i.e. how landscapes form and change) to data management to imagery interpretation, just to name a few. All this learnin' has led him to a new protocol that he is confident will lead to a successful Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment by May 2016. 

Here’s what Dave has been up to:

1. Gathering existing information on land cover types in the Gorge
2. On-the-ground plot placement within the Gorge
3. Surveying the plots to quantify what species are present
4. Grouping those species and environmental data into natural community types