 With the lighting to introduce to you our keynote speaker for the evening, Dr. Steve Brodsky is Assistant Unilever of the U.S. Geological Survey of New York, Co-operative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environment at Cornell University. He is a broadly trained, applied ecologist, entomologist, and sustainability scientist. Steve earned his Ph.D. in Wildlife Ecology from North Carolina State University and conducted research on solar energy and desert ecosystems as a Botox scholar and research ecologist at the University of California Davis. He specializes in the emerging field of renewable energy ecology, leading projects at spanned earth drill and aquatic environments, diverse access, and various energy technologies including solar, wind, and forest bioenergy. Dr. Brodsky and his collaborators conduct solutions-oriented research that tackles pressing environmental issues and guides a sustainable energy transition, so I will turn it over to him, Dr. Brodsky. Great, thanks very much for the intro, and thanks for the organizers, for your hospitality, and I'd like to give a shout out to my colleagues, Natalie West and Josh Campbell for showing me around the last couple days so I could check out some of these well paths and pipelines and the like. It's my first time being out here, and it's really exciting for me to see this. I like to step outside my comfort zone, see what's going on, and take a holistic approach to inform my research program, so I really appreciate y'all being here and listening to what I have to say. So, my research program centers on renewable energy ecology, which is the study of interactions among energy development ecosystems and people, and some of you may be wondering why I'm here. One of the central arguments I'd like to make in my talk is that in fact, energy development is an anthropogenic disturbance. It doesn't necessarily matter what the technology is that we're speaking about when it comes down to the science of it. I think there's a lot to be learned, and I don't think there's any reason from a scientific standpoint when considering these anthropogenic disturbances and ecological responses to separate conventional and renewable energy. I think as we transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy broadly, there's no direct cutoff, and I'm going to talk a little bit about that. It opens up new opportunities to sort of re-envision our approach to things like reclamation, or siting, or site preparation, or maybe more broadly our philosophy about how energy development fits into ecosystems, and dare I say that energy development is and people are part of ecosystems. That's the other thing I'd like to emphasize is that there's really, again, from a scientific standpoint, humans are part of ecosystems. We know we need energy. We don't need to go and live in a van down by the river and eat raw trout, barefoot, and whatnot. But I think if we learn from this point in time when there's a lot of movement with renewable energy development, that there are a lot of applications to oil and gas development. When we talk about energy transitions and when we talk about how energy is being developed and produced through time, just because there's a renewable energy boom doesn't mean, obviously, we all know here that there can be other booms in energy, including oil and gas development. I've taken the approach through time of looking at a blank screen. Yes, sir. As I've gone through my career, I've been focusing on certain topics. Wildlife ecology is where I started. As an applied ecologist, I was hoping to inform conservation and management of wildlife species in the context of contemporary global change, things that are happening in the real world right now. Renewable energy was one of those things. I happened to fall into a master's program studying wind energy and birds and bats. I then studied forest fire energy, birds, insects, solar energy development in the desert. Now in my current position, and as my viewpoint of the world has grown, I'm starting to think about things a lot more broadly and realizing that soils, plants, people, landforms, there's a lot going on there that might span beyond wildlife ecology. But just having that start really gave me a firm basis to build a more holistic understanding of informing what we might call a sustainable energy transition, which includes both conventional and renewable energy development. So expanding from that, we can consider some broader topics in terms of how we might approach conservation in the context of meeting these renewable energy targets, which are inextricably linked to conventional energy use, and I'll get a little bit more into detail about that momentarily. But the idea here is that there's multiple objectives occurring at the same time. So some of you might be aware of the 30 by 30 initiatives of conserving 30% of lands and waters by 2030. There's also very aggressive goals to meet emission reductions by that time as well. And what that's doing is creating a pinch point where we have multiple goals, timelines for those goals are aligning, and we need to figure out how to do it. And I think that it presents an interesting challenge and also opportunities to engage in creative solutions to try to meet these goals. And this isn't all just hippie-dippy stuff, right? I think in terms of when we talk about ideas about climate change and things of that nature and how oil and gas development fits into it, I think there needs to be a realistic approach in the sense that oil and gas development is going to happen, right? And it's part of the energy portfolio of the United States. But globally, I think there is a renewable energy transition at play that we can learn from. So in terms of connections, right, there's really no renewable energy development going on that doesn't involve conventional energies. So we need to transport pieces of wind turbines, for example, across the country. I worked at this solar facility. I mentioned earlier today this is Ivanpah Solar Energy Generating System. This is a concentrating solar power facility where there are thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of mirrors. And these mirrors beam light into the central tower, which has the liquid in it and then boils and creates steam and turns a turbine and creates electricity. Turns out that the sun doesn't really get hot enough to do that until about midday and they get them rolling with natural gas every morning. And it's just an example of how there's an integration of conventional fuels into renewable energy development. I think gets ignored when people talk about the renewable energy transition. So if you're talking about realistic solutions, I think you need to consider a holistic approach. And that's sort of the standpoint I take as an applied scientist because when you're talking about solutions, you're talking about working with people who are doing things on the ground. So y'all have that opportunity to, you know, if you're interested, explore some of these ideas in the sense that the real change that all these scientists are talking about happens with practitioners, it happens with folks on the ground. And that's why I engage with renewable energy industry consistently. Another commonality between renewable energy development and oil and gas is that a lot of it happens on public lands with mandates for multiple uses. And I think that theme sort of resonates here out west quite a bit. I have a lot of studies in the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts on Bureau Land Management Lands logo up here. But the idea is that, you know, we have these public lands, there's mandates for energy use, and then there's also other goals. It might be, you know, conservation. It might be other types of land uses, be they extractive or otherwise. And so thinking about this, again, holistically, there's a lot of commonalities. And the reason why I'm setting this up is because I'm going to get into some nitty gritty about some results from renewable energy that I can pretty much guarantee you from a scientific standpoint would apply to to what y'all are dealing with up in here. So what I'd like to do now is pretend to do a little case study. And this is a paper we published that has to do with solar energy development. And it gets at site preparation. And I think that there's sort of a, when we talk about reclamation, I finally said the word that everyone that we're here for, reclamation, that's on the back end, right? And I have a hunch that if you focus you, us, whoever, developers of any energy type, focus on sort of the front end of things, such as siting and site preparation, at least in the renewable energy world, what we're seeing is that that can in turn affect what you're doing after the energy is the energy facility is built in terms of reclamation or restoration or conservation. So these are the four treatments that we're the three treatments in a control that we were working with in this experiment. And they include blading, which is essentially bulldozing. And you can see the pictorial representations of these treatments here mowing, what they called a halo, which was kind of interesting because it had this angelic kind of feel to it. But the idea is that it was just undeveloped patches within the solar facility itself, and then undeveloped desert controls. So when considering things like siting and site preparation in this case, I think it can impact what happens on the ground once a once a facility is built and the construction is done. So in terms of, I really see this kind of resonating more with pipelines in the sense that some of these solar facilities are six, 7,000 acres, 9,000 acres, they're really big, a lot of them, especially in the desert southwest. And they could be big in other places in the west. And when I think about kind of the construction process, the development process, site preparation, you know, I see a lot of similarities with pipelines in the sense that, you know, the pipelines are kind of long and linear and seem to go on forever. And, you know, you have these solar facilities in this case that are more compartmentalized. But on a per area basis, I think it's probably quite comparable. And you can see that these solar facilities oftentimes can look similar to what you might see at a construction site for various development activities. So what we've found in terms of the ecological response of the desert plant community in this case to the site preparation treatments is that there are drastic differences in plant heights, for example. So in figure A, you can see that in the bladed treatments, those dots are representing the perennial average perennial plant heights in the given plot in the given sites. And what we're seeing to sum it up is that the undeveloped patches and the inside the solar facility and the vegetation outside of the solar facility and the control, we're seeing about the same plant heights. There's no statistical difference. In the mode plots, we're seeing a difference between the control and the undeveloped patches, statistically lower, but still way higher than bladed bulldozing. Bulldozing is bad, essentially, which might not be the most groundbreaking thing you've ever heard, but it turns out people still do a lot of bull dozing. Y'all might be familiar with some of that bulldozing. And then in panel B, what we're showing here is that some plants are more sensitive to disturbance than others. Specifically, these are plants that undergo the Prasulian acid metabolism. These plants are adapted to hot arid environments, so cacti and yucca, for example. Turns out if you do anything to them, if you bulldoze them or if you mow them, they don't grow back, whereas shrubs like creosote and ambrosia demosid do. So there are differences in plants in terms of how they respond to disturbance. The kind of illustration here, which I'll get to a little bit in terms of the social side, is that some of these plants have high values. It could be economic value, or it could be cultural value. It could be other values, and I'll get into that in a little bit. And then C, what that's showing is the relative abundance of a genus of plants called shizmus, and that's an invasive grass. And turns out they really like bulldozing. And there's a whole lot more invasive plants where there was bulldozing for site preparation for solar energy development, than mowing or just leaving undeveloped patches. That could be a concern because in the desert environment, shizmus can spread fire. I assume we don't want to have the solar facilities on fire. I think there, again, this will come full circle, but these are results, empirical results from an energy development study, right? Happen to be solar. What we were able to do after understanding the response of the individual plant species to different site preparation treatments, is create what we call an ecosystem service-based value system, which to a practitioner, probably sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo when I say it, it does too. But essentially, what, or when I hear it, I kind of get that, but it's a fancy way of saying like, what's the use of these plants in the sense of these different categories that have been developed to describe nature services to people, ecosystem services, there's provisioning, regulating habitat services and cultural services. And we could look through the literature and determine what check a box, zero or one, one if a plant is covering some sort of ecosystem service described in some sort of framework. The cultural services especially was interesting and also probably biased because what we did was we based it off of a lot of anthropological literature. We weren't able to actually engage with these indigenous communities, but the idea is that these plants have cultural value and we can quantify the effects on these cultural values by understanding first the species response to the disturbance and then using this value system to quantify the effects on the ecosystem services themselves. What we're able to show again is that intensive site preparation can lead to significant reduction in cultural services based on these data. And there's a couple list, a couple categories listed here. This sort of framework could be applied in the context of any cultural heritage. In this case, it was Native Americans in the desert southwest. You can also see that mowing, for example, had no different was not statistically different than leaving undeveloped patches inside of the solar facility. So it's a bit more intensive, but we're not seeing a huge drop in cultural services. There's a large social component to energy development, which we discussed already. One of the ways to contextualize that social component is to better understand the interaction between values and ecological response. I just exemplified how to do it in one way just now. There's probably others, but I think it's important to note that in terms of the efficacy of development as a whole, any kind of energy development, if you're looking at it from a holistic standpoint, it's important to understand how different on the ground construction activities, site preparation, siting, and so on, management, operations can affect ecosystem components that are of some value to people. I think that a lot of the response, negative response to development can stem from cultural heritage that are linked to ecological components of these systems. We also looked at pollinators at these same study sites. We looked at ants. Josh knows about the pollinators. We collaborated with other folks at USDA on the ants. That's a picture of me losing my mind in the desert, which is pretty cool. What we were able to find is that bees don't like bulldozing either. However, in some cases, we didn't see a difference in these undeveloped patches inside the solar facility and undeveloped desert outside of it. I'm going to talk a little bit more about that and how it might relate to some of these well pad reclamation activities. We also saw that in general, the ant community significantly differed between all the other treatments and the bulldozed treatments. There's been an evolution in site preparation with solar energy development in the desert. I bring this up because I think there are ways to re-envision site preparation for any type of energy development. What you can see here is this is in the Mojave Desert in Nevada. This is a start of a solar facility. The poles are in place. They'll attach the panels to those poles there. In the middle, what they did is something called drive and crush. Drive and crush is what it sounds like. They just run over stuff, but it turns out it's a lot better than bulldozing it and it's a lot better than mowing it. The idea is that in the beginning, with solar development, it was all bulldozing. Then there was mowing. Then there was drive and crush. With each evolution, the site preparation became less intensive and there was no real drop in the rate of development. To me, that signals that there could be wiggle room for re-envisioning site preparation for things like oil and gas as well in terms of pipelines where maybe instead of bulldozing, there could be opportunities to perhaps mow and do the construction or other less intensive site preparation activities that will in turn result in a reduction in cost for reclamation because you didn't disturb the site as much to begin with. I mentioned this already, but with the bees, I showed a particular species of bee. This is for all the bees in particular year and we were able to show that again in these undeveloped patches inside the solar facility. This is a significantly disturbed area, but in these undeveloped patches, all the plants were just left there. There's no disturbance whatsoever apart from them being surrounded by heliostats in this case. We're not seeing a difference in the count of bees between those areas and outside of the solar facility. I think this has implications for thinking about how we might envision landscape ecology in the context of oil and gas development and in turn how reclamation can stem from that. So this map I'd just like to show, so those diamonds are representing the dispersion of these undeveloped patches throughout the three power blocks of the solar facility and it's six miles across from one corner to the other. So there's, from a landscape ecology perspective, you have disturbed areas with interdispersed with undisturbed areas inside of the solar arrays. The reason I bring this up is because the more evidence we continue to accumulate from these solar studies in this case, I'm inclined to say that there might be similar responses by birds. We're starting to see some preliminarily some of that in New York with grassland birds and solar development. And what I'm getting at is that there's this concept of landscape ecology. When you think about oil, these well paths on the landscape, they might be small just like these undeveloped patches were small in respect to the grand landscape. But what we're seeing is that if you consider things like patches, corridors, borders and so on, a landscape ecology approach that the cumulative effects can be beneficial to pollinators, for example. And in turn, you might be able to increase pollination services to crops or at the very least look good for not killing a bunch of pollinators. People like them now. So if you think about this scenario, we have a series of developed areas in a matrix of undeveloped areas. These are essentially patches. And I think that through the reclamation process, if you were to go and reclaim these sites with a re-envisioned purpose, perhaps its pollinator habitat, which by the way is really big right now with solar energy development, that's the big selling point, right? It's like, it's going to be pollinator habitat, like soon be awesome. No one really knows what that is. And I have a project funded by the DOE that's kind of like, well, what I call pollinator friendly solar demystified. I forget what I called it when I submitted the proposal. It wasn't that. But that's kind of what it is. It's like, there's this idea of stimulating energy development through these kind of biodiversity goals. But we don't really know exactly how it works. But what we're starting to see with these empirical results that I just presented is that there is something there in terms of landscape ecology, energy development, and kind of re-envisioning how energy facilities gets put onto the landscape. And so if you think about it from that perspective, I think there's opportunities to engage in some activities that could be kind of neat to span beyond reclaiming the site, getting the veg straight. And I get it that there's operational stuff you have to take care of. But I'm curious to see if there might be ways to kind of extend beyond that. So here's a map from some colleagues at Argonne National Lab. And what they're showing is this potential for a pollinator friendly solar development to contribute to pollination services. Now, you'll see that North Dakota has zero. But you have that solar facilities to actually how does this thing work? So I feel like those, yeah, I mean, the zeros are really just there's, I don't know, I guess not hardly any solar facilities. There you can. This metric doesn't actually work if you don't have solar facilities there. But the idea is that in general, there's potential for pollinator habitat reclamation at solar facilities to enhance pollination services in neighboring agricultural fields. So the idea is that you're creating a source for pollinators that are then going and pollinating crops and surrounding fields. And this actually works out pretty well in places like the Midwest where, you know, if you go and develop a solar facility, you establish plants, floor resources for pollinators, and that solar facility is surrounded by 2000 acres of corn, then yeah, you're going to attract more pollinators there than you would in a monocultural corn. And in turn, there could be insect pollinated crops that can benefit from it. So the idea is that it's not there's potential for reclamation of some of the sites you all are dealing with to, you know, if you, I think it's possible to get at not just things like pollinator conservation, but maybe ecosystem services that are of interest as well. So that brings us to this concept of pollinator friendly solar and how to actually do it on the ground. And again, I think, you know, similarities exist. What we see in the beginning of solar development is kind of that same deal, sort of a blank slate, you want to reduce operations of maintenance costs, having to mow vegetation a bunch. And so really it started with just, first there was gravel, but then there was just bare dirt. And through time, there's been this sort of movement for planting native plants and so on. And again, increasing pollinator habitat is one objective, but it comes with a whole suite of different potential outcomes that have to do with erosion control, hydrology and so on. And that, again, that evolution has been reflected as not just site prep, that things have been changing in terms of solar development. It's also been on the back end after it's built, had to sort of reclaim or restore these sites. What was initially done is, you know, the seed mixes were kind of these DOT seed mixes that were put into play. Some of them were, you know, pretty, I guess it was just turf grass. And through, that was kind of the standard for quite a bit of time with solar energy development. Then you have these super boutique sites that I'm starting to encounter and working with folks where the seed mixes are very detailed. And it's unclear how well this would acclimate to sort of industrial build out of solar. These sites are pretty small and it's done, you know, by a very particular individual as a landscape architect and dealing with these sort of very intricate seed mixes. But the point is, that is evolving. And then you can have a, you'll have a mix for in between the panels, you'll have a mix for under the panels, you'll have a mix for under the panels and wet sites, dry sites and so on. And so it's possible to kind of increase the diversity of plants and still maintain a lot of the goals for reclaiming these sites in the sense of erosion control, pollinator habitat, and decreasing negative hydrological effects. And I know y'all are interested in seed mixes to some extent. And I think the seed mixes really can be dictated by what your ultimate goals are. I'll get into a little fight over mediation stuff too, but it's possible to design some of these seed mixes to get at broader goals or maybe comprehensive or concurrent goals. And what that looks like on the landscape in terms of those seed mixes I just showed, there are these different, the symbology showing where it's physically located on the, in a given solar facility. So it's very kind of intricate, but I think over time it could be somewhat easily adapted. And if you're talking about five to seven acre well pads, I think it's possible to perhaps diversify seed mixes to the point where you're achieving multiple objectives at the same time. And that's what we're seeing with solar. Here's an example of a site. The other thing is with solar energy, you're restricted to plants that don't grow above the trip line to the solar panels. That's going to introduce shading and decrease production. I think you'd have a lot more flexibility with some of these well pads after their decommission. I know there wouldn't be a height restriction and probably open up even a broader suite of plant species you might consider in the reclamation process. And maybe some of this is already going on. I'm not quite sure, but it seems like there's room for growth in the sense of maybe thinking about the possibilities for reclamation to achieve multiple objectives. There's also a lot of talk in the solar world about co-location. If you're going to go and put native plants in the ground and floor resources, a lot of times nowadays it's accompanied by the co-location of apiaries. So this is honey bee production. It's a little unclear how exactly this qualifies as pollinator friendly. We're looking into competition actually between honey bees and native bees and reclaimed. It's kind of interesting. Everyone in the renewable energy sector calls it restoration, but now I'm starting to think maybe it's reclamation. But the idea is that there's a general concept of co-location. And I think it really stems from Lane use competition, which after driving around out here a couple of days, maybe it doesn't apply here as much. It seems like space is a pretty abundant natural resource here, but in other places in the United States there's really intense competition between ag conservation and solar energy development. And I think to some extent that can happen anywhere regardless of how much space you have. There are limitations in terms of interconnection and technical potential, but the idea is with co-location you can reduce land use competition by kind of stacking multiple things on the same unit of land. In this case it's apiaries. We also have a sheep grazing study going on at Cornell, solar grazing I guess you could call it. And this seed mix, and again like in terms of your management objectives or your reclamation objectives and how you go about achieving them, they can kind of depend on what your goals are. In this sense they planted what was called a fuzz and buzz seed mix because they wanted it to be good for bees and they wanted it to be good for sheep. And this particular solar facility was built in an old field which out east is like basically an ag field that's going through succession and there's a native seed bank and eventually it would become a forest if nobody did anything to it. But it turns out that just leaving the site, there were two treatments, this fuzz and buzz and then this and leaving it fallow. And what ended up happening is that there was really no difference in forage quality for the sheep or floor resources for bees between the expensive fuzz and buzz and just straight up leaving it. The way it was just fallow, just leave it fallow and the native seed bank grew up and provided just as much or more resources than the planted seed mix. And I've talked to my USDA colleagues about the potential for that essentially leveraging the native seed bank and I guess it's possibly applicable to pipelines. After seeing them well past I'm thinking it's not there but something to consider and solar grazing is another example of co-location. There's also potential in terms of re-envisioning or adapting reclamation here to get at things like species conservation. So, you know, threatening endangered species or species that are at conservation risk. That's been a big selling point with solar energy facilities in the sense of contributing to species conservation in some manner or at least reclaiming some of the lost habitat from the development itself. Does anyone here familiar with the term regenerative agriculture? So, this is a big thing with solar as well. So, this is kind of neat because I'm understanding with these well pads that you know it's a it's not a it can be around for a while and it reminds me of solar leases right. So, a solar lease is 30 years right and then it's going to be decommissioned. So, all the solar panels that are out there 30 years from now supposedly they're going to be taken down. And the idea behind this regenerative agriculture as it pertains to solar energy development is that you can put plants in the ground that whose roots will you know go down pretty deep into the soil profile and it's going to churn things up and essentially reclaim the the the soils to a point where 30 years later you can go from marginal ag land to prime ag land based on the plants that you put in there during the reclamation process following construction. It's hard to really envision what that looks like so far out but I think in general with energy development we need to be thinking long term and some of these you know in terms of oil and gas development these rigs could be there you know apparently if we're near the internet 20 30 years or you know whenever they dry up it could be variable but it's a long it's kind of the same timeframe as what we're seeing with solar in this case and so there's potential for regeneration of soils and that's talked about a lot in the solar world as well. So I do have a study starting up in in uh California near Fresno and this one's interesting because it actually has reclaimed well pads on it it's 9 000 acres they're not pictured here but and we're going to include those as treatments in our study and these are all on salt affected ag land which there's a ton of in California and the idea is solar companies coming in they're going to build a 9 000 acre solar facility in this area on all these salt affected ag lands and part of the management plan that is being developed right now um you know there's there's plants that can be put in the ground that can aid in in fight over remediation there's plants in terms of uh salt around here you know if you can have plants that grow below that salt profile and exist through time and then apparently the salt just goes away somehow you not Natalie can explain that to you and then um but the idea is that like there's a lot of opportunity I feel like here to kind of get at some of the stuff y'all are talking about in terms of the the brine spills and things of that nature where there's actually a reclamation process being proposed here that entails uh fight over mediation and then also just another use for the land it's just sitting there there's nothing going on and so maybe that's a good place to put solar agriboltase is another example of co-location um and I don't I don't think it's super relevant here but the idea is that there's lots of stuff going on in terms of co-location with regards to solar and I think in terms of pipelines and and things of that nature it could just be more broadly just in a conservation context the co-location of conservation activities and pipelines but we want to be thinking about how to get the most bang for our buck in these disturbed sites if you're going to go and reclaim them you know what else can we do like how else can it be built out to achieve multiple objectives that might span beyond just the box that gets checked and if you were to do that how might that affect your optics how might that affect you know your capacity as a company to uh to continue forth in this era floating solar is another co-location so I have some uh collaborators at Cornell that are dealing a lot with the social acceptance of of solar energy development in New York State and in general a lot of folks think that solar facilities have have high potential or good synergies to be built and essentially what you would might consider marginalized lands or lands that have been already affected versus other lands such as forests which there actually is forest clearing in New York for solar energy development going on but uh the idea here is that you know if you already have like severely disturbed lands or degraded lands and that could be a good place to put solar at least that's what people think in New York and I don't know what they think about it here but I think there's uh potentially some good synergy in terms of where to put solar on around here on some some of these degraded lands and I'm going to show an example in a second but the idea here is that you know the bigger the bar um they think it belongs more there are these uh a big thing that's going on right now on sites where you have abandoned mines so mountaintop removal sites and such out east they're starting to put solar panels there and this is kind of to bring it back full circle the to the co-location idea or the use of these marginalized lands maybe instead of uh reclaiming some of these well pads or what have you to uh you know some vegetative state what if it's just land where you can put solar I don't know or put something else there um and that's something maybe to consider as well because it's happening quite a bit in um in the case of these abandoned uh or these mines that are just done now and it's we're seeing a lot out east uh currently so I looked up some and preparing for this talk I'd like to into some of the definitions of of reclamation and how they sort of evolve through time at least in the academic literature and I recognize that reclamation they're legal definitions right that seem to be important in terms of how it gets done and why people are doing things um and I think that in this case it kind of brings to light to me anyway that you know whether it's reclamation or restoration or whatever your definition might be I think it it's good to kind of push it a little bit push it to the limit like if reclaiming a site is to check a box is there a way to extend beyond that and then why would you do that well I don't know it's good for the world but even still like I'm learning with these renewable energy companies it's all about optics for them and I think that there's a lot to be said for you know pushing the limit on on co-benefits or synergies uh basically to look good at least that's what they're doing so I think it's uh there's something to be said for trying to you know do more I guess but it's not just about doing more I think it's for a slight increase in effort or maybe just a re-envisioning of how reclamation is defined you can get at multiple uh benefits for for ecosystems and and socially so I will end my talk by saying that you know hopefully some of this was useful I think it's it's interesting for me to learn about some of the differences between oil and gas development and renewable energy development I think there are more similarities and differences actually it's kind of tough to apply some of the research that I've done in the past because you know some of these well pads are there are you know there's a fair number of them and and they're somewhat um some of them are quite a bit smaller than the solar facilities I dealt with but in terms of thinking about this from a broad philosophical standpoint or thinking about it in the terms of of uh pipelines which are quite extensive um I think a lot of these these principles would apply just in terms of thinking about on the front end what can we do with siding what can we do with site preparation how can we set ourselves up for success down the road reduce environmental mitigation costs and then on the back end thinking about how can we build out our kind of concept of reclamation to include things like co-benefits and and synergies reducing things like dust reducing things like noise these are all things that actually I think can be um accomplished or at least mitigated by kind of uh pushing for those co-benefits so thanks a lot for having me and I can take any questions I don't exactly how to ask so maybe it's more to elaborate on something um you know kind of looking to talk about some of these solar facilities so 9,000 acres so compared to just kind of maybe that or some of the patchwork stuff that that's more the servants we have holistically a landscape approach how are the different ways to like maybe think about those not even on the reclamation but like active management of those things to promote you know you know to me it's like it's completely different on the model of that landscape all you can do is 9,000 acre thing in terms of 600 acres you might have for 10 acres. Okay yeah so I didn't quite elaborate on this in the talk but the idea is that I think cumulatively these patches can actually make a difference across the landscape if you were to have written you know targeted reclamation for example for pollinator habitat let's say you have what a thousand well pads are all five acres a piece or whatever it might be we're starting to see in in these 9,000 acre facilities or in the in the case of Ivanpah the results that I presented it's about 6,000 acres what we were seeing is that these very small patches these were less way less than an acre in size these small patches had conservation value if they were left undisturbed we were seeing a positive response from pollinators and so what I'm suggesting is that it's possible that if there was for example I mean using pollinator habitat as an example if you were to go in and reclaim all these well pad sites to some state where there's pollinator habitat and in turn these are providing resource islands for pollinators and then there's you know co-benefits for pollination services for neighboring crops because the sugar beet factory closed down you need to diversify your crop portfolio for example there I think there might be a connection I think in terms of you know and that's on the reclamation side in terms of the the kind of physical disturbance from the construction activities itself I think there's probably more parallels between the pipelines and some of these larger solar facilities but I guess what I'm getting at is from the landscape ecology perspective the the concept itself of patches applies and if you if you were to reclaim patches you could have a cumulative effect across the landscape and interactions between the patches and surrounding landscape