Our goals are to engage 100,000 underserved youth statewide in environmental education, engaging them in the conservation and preservation of Minnesota wilderness through the experiences in the outdoors.
Use mobile AI-assisted technologies to survey lake visitors. Assess perceptions of water quality and perceived threats. Combine survey data with water quality data and trend monitoring to inform lake management.
Minnesota Sea Grant seeks to create a science-policy fellowship program to train Minnesota's science-policy workforce and advance Minnesota's water resource policy, emulating Sea Grants successful federal-level fellowship program.
We propose robotics-based educational activities for middle-school youth on water quality in Minnesota. Youth will gain skills for measuring water quality and communicating results through group study and hands-on projects.
This project will collect water samples at seventeen monitoring locations ranging in size from 23,173 acres (7 Mile Creek) to over 9 million acres (Minnesota River at St. Peter) as a part of the Watershed Pollutant Load Monitoring Network (WPLMN). The Minnesota State University - Water Resources Center (WRC) has been directly involved with the program and is familiar with the streams and hydrology of the region. In addition to monitoring, the WRC will review, manage and submit the data in formats provided by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA).
Tetra Tech will work to support the science needed when planning in Minnesota for water storage practice implementation. The goal is to provide practical water storage recommendations that can be incorporated into smaller scale planning within major watersheds (HUC 8), as well as larger scale planning for the Sediment Reduction Strategy for the Minnesota River and South Metro Mississippi River.
To expand children's arts programming at the Watonwan Count Fair by providing hands-on learning opportunities and demonstrations. The fair will also welcome Latin, Norwegian, Swedish, and German Dancers to the stage, enhance the fair’s creative arts exhibits, host a historic horse pull, and purchase a portable PA system to ensure that all cultural activities can be heard by fairgoers.
The Watonwan Watershed Technician will provide highly focused targeting of conservation programs and practices. The technician will enhance current staff capabilities in the Watonwan watershed by collecting landowner contact information from previous studies and GIS methods, produce mass mailings about funding opportunities, and meet one-on-one with landowners to discuss their conservation concerns. The technician will implement 45 projects/practices over a three year period.
In conjunction with the Watonwan Major Watershed Project engagement process, create a contact strategy for community/landowner opportunities, obstacles, and opinions on land management and water quality that will result in the identification of restoration and protection strategies for the Watonwan River watershed.
Develop a network of informed citizens, business people, community leaders and others capable of acting collectively to get work done in a sustained, strategic and meaningful way through a sense of shared ownership in the water resource management process.
The Watonwan Watershed Resource Specialist has been funding with Clean Water funds since 2012. Since that time, the Watonwan Watershed Resource Specialist has been a crucial connector between landowners and natural resource professionals in the Watonwan Watershed. As the technical ability and responsibilities of the WWRS expands, the need and urgency to secure extended funding becomes a priority. This project will fund half of the Watonwan Watershed Research Specialist position through year 2020.
With the completion of LiDAR data in southern Minnesota, it is imperative to use this data as effectively as possible. In order to do so, the Greater Blue Earth River Basin Alliance (GBERBA) will contract with a vendor to complete a Geographic Information System (GIS) terrain analysis in subsheds of the Watonwan River watershed. This inventory will utilize the State of Minnesota LiDAR elevation datasets to create many GIS datasets by spatially analyzing the elevation data.
To contract with qualified professionals to prepare planning documents that will help preserve West Bridge, listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Soccer is important to Somali culture and the most popular sport in Somalia. The proposed activity is our 11th annual Thanksgiving tournament. In order to make the popular tournament a more holistic community event, we will incorporate Somali singers and poets into the soccer tournament program.
Over the past five years, awareness of our organization has spread across the state. As a result, our attendance numbers have grown by 66%. We regularly hit max capacity, and the demand for outreach programs has gone up. Ex-S.T.R.E.A.M. expansion addresses three specific elements: 1) New space: Renting an additional 2,800 sq. ft of exhibit space to address spatial constraints.
