Tech Talk Replay from August 3, 2020. Karin Jokela, Xerces Society, reviews the monarch habitat evaluation guide (WHEG). She demonstrates how to assess various herbaceous plant communities to determine insecticide risks, weed management risks, milkweed stem density, forb cover, and forb richness. Karin also provides tips on plant ID and support tools.
Tech Talk Replay from July 27, 2020. Join George Schwint, MPCA, covers nutrient management planning with manure. George will reviews County and State permitting, manure testing, credits, current impairments, loss pathways, feedlot and land application rules, and practices to reduce movement.
This short course looks at application equipment you may see in corn and soybean producing areas.
This webinar goes into the details of the five soil disturbing processes modeled in RUSLE2 (inversion, mixing, mixing with some inversion, lifting/fracturing, and compression). A video of a tillage implement in action for each of the processes is shown and discussed. The effects of the tillage types are demonstrated and discussed in a comparison between a conventional, reduced-till, and no-till corn/soybean rotation.
Cover Crop Strategies offers a series of Podcasts related to Cover Crops and Soil Health. Topics include Cover Crop Management Tips, Choosing Cover Crop Goals First, Grazing Systems Need Soil Health Improvement Too, Combining Cover Crops and Not-Till Organic among other topics. Check it out!
Blue Thumb has a three part video series posted on their website called "Watersmart Landscaping: Raingardens". In addition, there is a video for "How to Install a Raingarden" and several other available resource materials available for download.
The Division of Forestry has developed silviculture strategies to inform sustainable forest management in Minnesota. These documents include information on the following key elements for each native plant community (NPC) class:
Vegetation, structure, and composition
Landscape setting and soils
Tree suitability
Tree response to climate change
Tree establishment and recruitment
Stand dynamics and growth stages
2-page silvicultural strategies for each major natural disturbance agent
Climate change is altering forest ecosystems, with many changes expected by the end of the 21st century. Forests vary widely, and not all forests are equally at risk; vulnerabilities are strongly influenced by regional differences in climate impacts and adaptive capacity.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has developed a Forest Ecology and Management course focused on advancing knowledge and skills for USFWS biologists, foresters and others who manage forests on refuges or partner lands to meet wildlife habitat needs and objectives.
Climate change is affecting the species and communities that make up our forests in a myriad of ways. Dr. Morelli will present a synthesis of the impacts of climate change on the wildlife of the forests that cover much of the Midwest and northeastern U.S. Based on a mix of expert elicitation and literature review, she will show what species are predicted to be most vulnerable to climate change, as well as the uncertainty around those predictions. Tools to incorporate the latest science into management decisions in order to achieve climate change adaptation will also be reviewed.