Dear Friends, Community Members, and Nevada County Family,
I write to you with excitement, gratitude, and humility with an announcement (in case you haven’t heard):
We’re back, and we’re more excited than ever to work with YOU.
As we approach the new year, we here at Sierra Streams Institute are looking forward more hopeful than ever, inspired by the resilience of our community and our SSI family. Make no mistake—these past two years were fraught. With the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, the building of a new office and lab space after losing our office to the Jones Fire, and a transition in leadership and staff at the organization, we can truly say we are in uncharted territory for SSI. But, with loss and change comes renewal.
Needless to say, the past year has left us feeling reflective, but also renewed. We need your donation to build on that progress and reach the following goals for 2022:
- Complete the California Environmental Laboratory Certification process for our in-house lab, allowing us to serve as a regional non-profit hub for water quality sample processing for partner organizations.
- Continue our work with the California State Water Boards to launch a new eDNA bioassessment program, providing identification of aquatic organisms entirely from DNA in water samples, allowing us to better track ecosystem health over time and in response to stress such as fire, mine contamination, and climate change.
- Share forest health data directly with the community, guiding as opposed to directing land management decisions on private land.
- Expand our education program’s reach to continue to work with our students of all ages on issues related to forest health, fire, aquatic ecology, and overall watershed health.
- Present our 20+ years of community science data and work with you, our community, to establish a new set of 20-year monitoring and research goals!
- Establish a more direct science communication program that works to directly connect the community to data and research that is relevant to you.
These goals reflect a renewed sense of purpose. We have always viewed ourselves as a scientific extension of our community, working to guide robust science that can answer questions that concern YOU. Your contribution can help us continue to play that role by helping fund the core of what we do: citizen and community science. Thanks to our dedicated citizen scientist volunteers and your generous support, we only missed a single month of water quality data in our monitoring of Deer Creek and the Bear River after the Jones Fire. And this has had important implications for the community. Here is just a sampling of what your contributions have helped us do through community science this past year:
- Identify public stream access points with water quality concerns that were labeled by the City of Nevada City.
- Track water quality impacts of the River Fire in support of multiple public agency partners.
- Utilize our data to assess the impacts of climate change on our watersheds and where streams are more or less resilient to stress; this provides a model for watershed-based climate susceptibility analysis for other watershed groups.
- Continue the National Science Foundation-funded Our Forests program with outdoor, COVID-safe protocols in place. This program teaches 3rd-5th graders not only what forest health means, but how to use forest monitoring tools to collect real data that is used to manage our landscape.
- Initiate two new EPA-funded contaminated site remediation projects in Crescent Mills and at the Susanville Indian Rancheria.
- Establish a new partnership—the first of its kind for a non-profit organization—with Beale Air Force Base to restore anadromous fish habitat and riparian ecological integrity where a dam was removed just last year.
- Continue research with academic partners into the relationship between mine site byproducts and health impacts such as cancer in gold country.
- Leverage our experience and analysis of the Jones Fire to launch a program that puts forest ecology data in the hands of landowners to guide community-driven, landscape-scale forest management to reduce likelihood of high-severity wildfire and increase forest resilience to stress.
- Launch a new SSI Membership program to increase the number of ways you can easily support our work. Visit https://sierrastreamsinstitute.org/donate/ for more information.
And this is just the beginning of our new future. This is a time of change, and we hope to embrace that change and plot a new course with you. So help drive, guide, and support the next chapter of Sierra Streams Institute. Make a tax-deductible donation today, and support community science.
With immense gratitude,
Jeff Lauder