 Okay, we are now recording. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Stephanie. And so let's start the. April 14, 2023 meeting of the 10 of Amherst solar bylaw working group. Thank you everybody for being here. Jonathan Thompson. Thanks for joining us. I see you're here as well. We'll get to you pronto. Yeah. Okay. Great. But let's. A few people still coming in. Let me. We're missing large. Anybody, Stephanie, do recall if she's. Not able to meet me today. I don't think I received anything. I was just in a meeting though. So if she sent it, oh, here she is. Oh, great. Yeah. Okay. And that rounds us out completely. So great. Okay. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Let me. Stephanie, what would, let me just ask you in terms of your recommendation, should we do some of the, like the minute approvals before we get to Jonathan or start straight off with Jonathan. I think. If people have reviewed them, I think it's quick enough. Usually if people have reviewed them, you can just get them out of the way. Okay, great. We will. Okay. So, um, and before I get started, um, According to my records, um, Bob, you're up for the minutes today. Yeah, I'm already started. I don't see him. Yeah, Jack isn't in yet. And I don't think I've heard from him, but I think you have a quorum and it's. Okay. Okay. Okay, great. Um, okay. But, uh, Bob, you're on, on the minutes today. That's right. Yeah. Great. Thank you. And, um, Uh, And we do. Yeah. Okay. And, and, uh, Dan, just so you know, you're up next next. Next meeting super. Okay. And, uh, and let me also, uh, and Chris is here. Thank you. Great. Uh, let me just, uh, a big shout out to Chris for her, uh, uh, revisions and updates on, on the, uh, on the draft thing so far. And I did also want to, uh, provide a big shout out to Dan for his, um, um, paper and report and, uh, to us on, on, um, uh, the issues with force and carbon. Uh, I thought that was really helpful and well done. Um, and I think relates quite a bit, uh, nicely with the conversation we'll have with Jonathan today as well. So thank you, Dan, for that. Um, doing sorry just to apologize. Uh, Jack did actually send an email that he's, he's not going to be able to make today's meeting. Okay. So, you know. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Um, okay. Um, so we do actually have two sets of minutes, um, for approval today. Um, Call up the agenda and the minutes here. Uh, let's go in chronological order. Uh, so the first set of minutes that, uh, let's review is, uh, from the meeting on the 17th of March. I have that correct. Yeah. Um, did people have a chance to look at those. And any. Comments, edits or a motion to approve. Yeah. Yes. I'm afraid I found the minutes from March 17th really rather unclear and confusing and still a lot of typos and so on. And I just felt that it, it needs some further editing before I would be willing to approve them. I can work on them more if folks are inclined to wait. I'm more than happy to, uh, spend more time on those. Um, was there anything specific? Martha, was that basically just a general. Uh, no, it's basically a general. I mean, there were several places where I was kind of confused. So I didn't write them down specifically. I, I could later send some things to Stephanie if you wanted me to. So, uh, Or. Um, well, let's, um, See if there's a consensus on that or, um, whether anybody wants to, um, Take a motion to approve them. Um, I, since I wrote the minutes, I feel bad. Sorry. I try to figure out who wrote it. It was going to take it. So I'm sorry. Sure. Wayne was being very, Dwayne was being very diplomatic there, but, um, so actually probably be helpful if you like put some things like, I don't understand that kind of thing. So. Okay. I think the difference is, sorry, I should raise my hand. Um, I think this, those minutes read almost more like a transcript. You know, and I think by the way again, that's a ton of work. So Kudos to you. Kind of transcript the meeting. Um, but I, um, I think it's just a different. What, um, Then what is normally submitted, which is. I'm guessing Martha. You kind of like to gain like feeling from the conversation. The threat. Um, but, uh, I mean, it's just my opinion. So if everybody. That's okay. I just, um, I think that, um, mildly concerned is. But I think they're, I don't have a problem with them. But like, I'll, I don't, I don't love mostly because. I don't love Stephanie having to go and rework. Maybe if there is issues, Martha, maybe you want to work directly with. With Janet. We just next meeting. Any Stephanie and Martha and I can work it out together. So. Well, I think, yeah, I think Martha can just send me. You know, point out what it is. And I can. I can just tweak them and I, you know, We have time before the next meeting. So, um, I won't be this week or next week. Well, this week is over, but next week, I won't be able to do it. But I can probably get them done before the meeting after that. Okay. Let's, let's do that then. And, uh, So we'll, we'll shelve. Those minutes for, uh, Voting on today. And Martha, you'll, um, Maybe go through and do a first cut and or Lisa. Provide some thoughts and specific areas where you, you think some additional clarity would be helpful. Uh, and then Stephanie can work on those. Okay. The meeting, the, sorry, the minutes for the meeting, the last meeting, um, March 31st. Did folks have. A chance to, um, review those and. Yeah. And, you know, I will say, I mean, you know, since we have different minute takers, um, We have different styles to some extent. Um, but I think it's. Helpful that everybody is, uh, Pleased with the minute. So, um, and I'm. Locking on who took these minutes. Um, well, it was. That would be me. Yeah. Okay. Great. So. Those were my minutes up until the public. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. And, uh, Dan. Uh, yeah, just on page four of those minutes. I'd like to correct the spelling on my last name. To C. O. R. K. R. A. Sorry. There's two, two times there. It's all right. No problem. Don't take it. Sorry. I'm typically pretty sensitive that because of my life. No worries. Yeah. So that, that's all I had. As am I, and I'm sorry, I didn't catch it. Okay. So I think that's something Stephanie can probably just take care of. Would they go finalized? Yeah. Okay. Any other comments on the minutes of the 31st of March. Or a motion to approve. I moved to approve the minutes from March 31st. I'll second. Okay. And by voice vote. No particular order. McGowan. Yay. Hannah. Yes. Bigger. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Hey, the minutes are approved. Okay. So we will. Delay the staff updates and the committee updates until we have. The opportunity to have a discussion with Jonathan Thompson. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just for, I think we've all had access at least to your. Background from, from the website, but just for everybody. Dr. Jonathan Thompson is a senior ecologist at Harvard forest. In, in, in Peter sham. And. And I think as it relates to, to our topic, I think we've all had access to the, the decarbonization roadmap and the clean energy plans. Particularly on the, on the side or the issues. With regard to land use and, and. Forest or forest and ecological services and so forth. And the importance of that in the plan as well. So we really. I think you have a little bit of a, some background of what we're up to. And you're probably not. I'm not familiar with the issues that towns. Around Massachusetts, particularly in Western Massachusetts are working through with regard to issues of solar and siting and zoning. So we're really. Looking to, you know, have some good science based information with regard to how, how we sort of make recommendations moving forward and design. The. The, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the zoning. The bylaws around this. So really appreciate. Your expertise and joining us. I think we, yeah, go ahead. I think you can introduce yourself a bit more in a bit of background. I know you, and I think it's great. That this will be more of a discussion than a presentation. But why don't I turn it over to you first to. and and get us started. Sure. Well, I appreciate the opportunity to talk with you all. I see what you're doing as sort of the gold standard of how towns should handle this issue in terms of being thoughtful and seeking out opinions. And, you know, a lot of towns aren't resourced enough to do this or to divide it to do this or whatever. So, you know, it's kudos to you. I live in Leverett, but I live right on the Amherst town line. I'm going to got my undergrad at UMass. I feel connected to your town. So, I'm happy to help. And yeah, this to the extent I can. And this does not need not be the last conversation. Getting a lot of feedback. Yep. Sorry about that. Yep. Is it better now? I'm getting an echo. I think it might be coming from Martha. I'm sorry, Martha, I'm meeting you. Let's see. Is that better? Yeah, that went away then. So, thanks. So, anyway, just feel free to contact me whenever is all I wanted to say. It doesn't need to be a big formal thing if I can help. And by way of relevant introduction and disclaimers, I should say that I'm leading the analysis for Massachusetts Audubon's solar siting study that we are doing, the Harvard Forest and Mass Audubon, where we're looking at alternative build-out scenarios that really recognize the value of natural and working lands and try to meet the clean energy goals that the state put forward while minimizing the impacts on the state's ecosystems. That report will be out in June. And we'll have a bit of fanfare around it. I'm sure you'll hear about it. But if you don't and you want to check back with me, that's fine. I also have some National Science Fund and NSF funding to research this issue. And I just want to be clear that I'm going to sort of talk to you and I'm going to like meld all the things that I'm doing. Some of the things I'm doing are not, you know, Mass Audubon doesn't have anything to do with it and they don't want anything to do with it. And so I wouldn't want anything. So the things I say, feel free to attribute to me. I'm happy to stand behind them, but don't, you know, put them as Mass Audubon because some of the things, like if we talk about the tradeoffs between forest carbon and solar, that's not something Audubon wants in the report because, and I respect that decision because the report is all about not having to make the tradeoff between forests and solar, but how can we have both? But I still think it's an interesting question to think about the tradeoff just in terms of carbon. And so I've done a bunch of research into that tradeoff. That research will not be part of the Audubon report. It's totally separate. They know about it. They like it, but it's just not the same. So I just want to be clear about that so that I didn't get in trouble later, if anything says, oh, Mass Audubon says this, because it's just Thompson, he says it. So anyway, yeah. And so I also was the lead author of the land sector report for the decarbonization roadmap for the state. And I continue to work now with the new governor and her office and particularly with the new climate chief Hoffer, who lives in Barrie, by the way, which is pretty cool, and advise them. And I'm running a bunch of new analyses to build on that and have helped with the CECP, both of those that have come out. So I'm happy to talk about any of that. Any questions you have? I have like a bunch of figures open on my computer so that I can share them with you, but it's not a presentation. I'm not going to roll through a bunch of slides. Yeah. And so with that, any questions? How do you want to do this? So yeah. Dwayne, if I might, we did submit a list of questions that were distributed to the entire group. Yeah, I think that might be a good place to start. Use those as a starting point, Jonathan. And then we can just see how the conversation goes. And these set of questions that we did prepare ahead of time doesn't include anybody else from the working group here to put in another question as it comes up. I got a set from Stephanie and then an extended set later from Janet. And so you want to start at the top of the list that came from Stephanie. I don't know the provenance of the various lists. Janet, it would be helpful if you would send that list to me as well because so the rest of the working group can have it and we can have it for the packet. Thank you. You're muted, Janet. I sent the questions to you and you sent them out to the committee in a pre-packet thing. Okay, that's probably why I don't remember. Too many items circulating. Okay, that's fine. And be great. I was going to put a sort of a pitch for maybe the first few questions on my list before we get to the next set because I think the first questions I had, which I could read, are kind of framing questions like talking about the environmental services of forests and wetlands in them, their role in water recharge, atmosphere, weather and climate change. And then obviously what you're working on is like the role of natural working lands in terms of the state plans and roadmap. Had it started the big thing and go down and then I think to the nitty gritty. Those are really big questions though. I teach classes on these questions. So we're going to try to go through them quickly. But if you know, if ever you want like a specific thing, I'll do my best. I'm not expert on all things, but I do mostly land use impacts on New England ecosystems is my specialty. So that's going to be good to like start with the framework and then get into the nitty gritty. But I also realize an hour is very short. So sure. So this seems to me a fairly decent time to show a couple of quick figures because they can go a long way in explaining things. So now we got to see if I can share my screen. Okay, I'm just going to share my whole desktop there. But now I can't see you all. So will somebody tell me audibly if they see a slide that says four centuries of forest cover change? Looks good, Jonathan. Yep. Okay. So for zoom, well, I don't know what anybody's background are. So if I'm just going to high level, you can ask me more questions. But this, you know, the proper way to show this would show that for 10,000 years, New England was a people landscape. Many different tribes in our region. It was a lot of Nipmuk and the land, the landscape was by and large closed canopy forest, right? And so picture a line, a squiggly line going up and down for 10,000 years. And then about 400 years ago, we know this story, European colonists come in and they clear a lot of the land for agriculture and grazing and firewood and about the time the rose writing Walden, Massachusetts hits its nadir and forest cover. Interesting, you know, I always think that like Thoreau himself never saw a deer. He heard that Emerson's aunt once saw one. So that just gives me a real way of thinking about how transform the landscape was. And then we have a, you know, a century and a half of natural reforestation punctuated with some really big events like the 1938 hurricane, like a pine box boom and other things. But by and large, agricultural abandonment leads to a natural reforestation of the landscape till sometime in the seventies or eighties when net reforestation loses out to net deforestation. And now for about a couple of decades, Massachusetts like most of the other New England states have been losing forest cover. So this is just forest cover. It doesn't say anything about the forest themselves. But that's interesting context. I always tell my students, you know, as you hike around Massachusetts or anywhere else, remember no one ever built a stone wall in the woods. And we see stone walls everywhere. And that is your reminder that this was once an open landscape. So that's the story of forest cover. So what happened within the forest? I won't talk about forest composition today, but, you know, we have this diverse mixture of species here that are surprisingly very similar to the historic range of variability. Indeed, aside from chestnut, all the native tree species are here today. The relative abundance has changed, but the general composition has been pretty stable. At the Harvard forest, we have a series of eddy flux towers. That's what you see in this picture here. You can actually see a little one over here. If you can see my mouse, which I can see you guys while I was doing this, but I can't. Oh, there you are. Now I can. So this little tower measures carbon fluxes in and out of the atmosphere six times per second, right? And this is the oldest such tower in a forest in the world. When we built that tower, the little one that my mouse is on, I hope you can see that, when we built that tower, Steve Wofsey, who built it, didn't know if it would stand up overnight. Nobody had ever done it before. And they had been used this technology in crop fields, but nobody ever kind of had the audacity to build one in a forest. Since then, it's become pretty common. There's more than 1,700 towers built off this. And we have more than a few at the forest. This graph is a figure from three different eddy flux towers. This thick green line is from the tower I was just pointing at, the EMS tower. When we built that tower, it actually went up in 88, but we kind of recalibrated it in 92. What this line shows is the accumulating carbon in the forest since the tower was built. It's got a little sawtooth on it because those are the seasons. The leaves come on, the leaves come off. It's in a hardwood forest. When we built it, the expectation was that New England forest had reached a dynamic equilibrium and the sink was full and that we weren't going to sequester any more carbon. We thought that based on some physiology and some other places like up in New Hampshire and Hubbard Brook, boy, were we wrong. The reason we don't know is because we cut down all the old growth. There's no old growth reference for us to go out there and say, how much carbon can a forest hold? The only old growth we have left is on really crappy sites. That's why they didn't cut them down in the first place. The good sites all got cut down. It's kind of an interesting mystery to me that I think I work with the smartest forest people around and anybody who tells you they know when this line will level off is lying. They don't know. We know they won't go on forever. They're not redwoods. They're not going to get to be that big, but we don't exactly know when respiration, which is just like you and I respire, will balance out with photosynthesis, which is what this shows. Up, up, this goes. So you ask what forests do? Well, one thing they really do is accumulate carbon, pull it out of the atmosphere. This blue line is another tower. We put it up in 2005. That's why it starts here. And we built this one in a hemlock forest. And so you can see at first the hemlock grew pretty much just like the hardwoods. And up and up until hemlock willy-a-delgia shows up. Right? And that's what you see here. That's a little aphid-like insect that's killing all the hemlock trees in the U.S., all the eastern hemlock trees, all the eastern hemlocks in the Southeast are gone. We know that it came into Richmond, Virginia in 1955 and we've just been watching it ever since in this slow sort of demise of the tree. And so this comes down. This only goes to 2016. I have a complicated version that I'm not going to show you. But in fact, this is starting to recover and go up again now as Black Birch has gotten established in the understory and another species is taking up carbon. So there was this little wave of what's going on. This red line we put up in a clear cut is a tower we put up in a clear cut. And I like to show these three together because it shows the different trajectory. But this one is really the story of the resilience of the forest. For the first four or five years, the line goes down, which means there's more carbon going into the atmosphere than coming out of the atmosphere. It's a source. And that's because after logging, there's a lot of slash on the ground. All the roots are going to decompose. You've warmed up the soil. There's more microbial activity. All that stuff pushes carbon out of the atmosphere. Decomposition is just photosynthesis in reverse. And that's what you're watching until, in this case, a whole load of pin cherry establishes in the site, becomes miserable to walk through, but the carbon starts accumulating. And now this continues up and is on a pretty similar trajectory. I think that's an important context because most of our forest, most of Amherst's forest, is this green line. It looks more like this green line with pockets of this blue line spread throughout where there are hemlock and maybe ash, which isn't also suffering from insect infestation. In that case, it's the emerald ash borer. But that the forest generally comes back. If you look at the state of Massachusetts, this is the distribution of standages of all the forests in Massachusetts. You can see most of them are around 85 to 90, maybe a little more than 100 years old. This forest was about 90 when we built this. And so here, you're in this phase of the trajectory in most of Massachusetts. Harvard forest is a little bit over. So I have lots of maps about carbon, but I'll stop sharing and then just go back to talking. But as far as the general state of the forest, forests have been reduced to their carbon a lot lately. I think that's kind of a shame. It's because they do so much more. But the carbon is relevant to any conversation about forest. It's one of the primary ecosystem services. Of course, probably in Amherst, second to that, my guess would be sort of recreation and aesthetic. But these are judgment calls. I don't know that there's anybody who could say what's more important than what. Then their role in water filtration, given that we have a lot of surface water that people drink in the town is the next one. But that's fairly constrained. And then the groundwater protection and erosion protection, also part of that of biodiversity. One of the questions asked about any distinctions of Amherst forest. They have some very distinctive vernal pools and habitats for the soggy forests, as I think of them. The upland forest in Amherst are pretty typical of upland forests in the region. Maybe there are pockets of unique upland habitat that I don't know about. But I'd say in general, the upland forest is pretty typical upland forest of a typical age and species composition that they have everywhere else. How's that for just high-level context for the forest? Do we want more or what? I think that's really helpful to get us started. Anybody else before I think to get into some of the questions, other questions that we provided to you would be really helpful. Janet, you have a hand? Yeah, go ahead. Thank you. Thank you for that. That was like a lot of high-level or very conclusive information. I know we can't pull everything out. So one of the things I've been looking at is the 20, 25, 20, 30 climate plan and then the 2050 plan and then also Amherst climate action plan and resilience plan. And so all of those three plans and also the carbon decarbonization roadmap all really say promote natural working lands. And they have a huge role in climate change. And I wonder if you could address that. Like just kind of say what that role is and what they do and why everybody wants to protect and expand it. Okay. And then I'd like to get to the other question because that kind of gets to some of these other questions as well. In terms of carbon sequestrations, which so right now we don't have a lot of ways to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. I mean, there's some technology that's coming around. David Keith and others have built this around about free air capture and then you pump it down in oil wells. But that's still at best really expensive and in more realistic, very tenuous. And so I don't think anyone wants to rely on that. So the only the best technology that we have that scales for getting carbon out of the atmosphere are trees and photosynthesis. Right. I mean, that's what they do. They move carbon from CO2 and turn it into sugars and starches and puts it in the forest and then eventually into the soil. But there's only one pathway out and that's through a stomata and a leaf and that's the only way it happens. Right. And so it's about 10% of 1990 level emissions that Massachusetts Forest sequester. We use 1990 as a baseline across the planning mostly because you had to pick a year. You know, it doesn't it doesn't really matter. But because emissions change, it's helpful to all agree on one year and keep talking about it. So 10, 10% in Massachusetts and you know, it's different globally. Massachusetts, that's maybe a high number. I think it was seven in our modeling, but these things are difficult to do. So let's let's call 10 because it's a nice round number. You know, that number may could be as high as 14 or 15 without land use. But by and large, you know, you there's so that's a pretty small window is what I'm saying. Like if all the people just left and we didn't do anything and we took all our bugs with us, right, and we just let the forest grow, you the sequestration number would be equivalent to like 14 or 15. So it wouldn't it's it's just that little bit between 10 and 14 that land use depresses the sequestration capacity of the forest. All this to say is that they're important. It's not nothing. But emissions reduction is always going to be more important, you know, stopping emitting carbon out of smokestacks and tailpipes is got to be where the other come from. So the the net zero legislation said that we would be net zero by 2050. It used to be 80 by 50 80% reduction baker up that to net zero. And the net in any net zero allows for sequestration. And so that they said you could go to 85% emissions reduction, and then use the forest for the last 15. Well, they're never going to be able to use the forest for all 15 that we just don't have enough forest, they're just not going to be able to get there. And then how you do the math. And then it becomes a policy question, whether that should be additional or not. And I don't know if that's a concept that you guys have gotten into additionality. It basically means should you be able to count the background 10% that the forest are just doing anyway, or should you only be able to count for things that you actively do as a climate policy, that would be additional above the background. And if you're going to do it with additionality, you're going to get nowhere near 15, you're going to get 1% or something like that. The state hasn't said how they're going to do it. We don't know the legislature hasn't addressed it. So to me, it almost doesn't matter. I mean, reducing emissions by 85%. And let's not screw up our forest. In the meantime, seem like a sufficient goal to me in the near term, arguing over how we do the math around one or two percent seems like a waste of energy, my opinion. So I don't even remember what question I was answering anymore. Well, I think that leads well to some of our other questions as well, too, Jonathan. So this has been great. And I think what I wouldn't mind turning to is at least try to use the questions we put forward to you prior to the meeting as a guide at least. And you were getting to some of this in your introduction, as well as what you were just talking about and the work that Dan provided to us in his analysis really did differentiate between the active sequestration versus the carbon in the carbon stand. That's a huge concept that everybody seems to get confused about stocks versus sequestration, yes. And Dan, just again, you laid that out really well for us in your paper. Before I pose the question, Jonathan, Stephanie, did you have something for us? No, just quickly, I wanted to say that it would be good to summarize the question for the public that's in attendance. So if you could state the question and or summarize it before you answer, that would be great. Yeah, I was good. Public in attendance. How do we know? And just so you know, Jonathan, yeah, we do. Obviously, it's an open meeting and we encourage public participation. And we do have 1212. Yeah, okay. Okay, so you know, the and you know, thinking about solar now, and obviously, if and if if and when a solar prod in, you know, that's what's happening, as you know, solar projects, solar develop comes in and clears up some some acreage of forest. The carbon impact is going to somewhat depend on what is the fate of that biomass that's taken off off the at least in terms of the stock, not so much the continued sequestration. But in terms of the carbon stock, you know, if it's if it's burnt, if it's all piled up and burnt in a pile, then all that carbon is going to be emitted to the atmosphere. But if some of it goes into merchantable products and particularly longer, long lived products, lumber, for example, then some of that stock does stick around for a continued long time, potentially. So a question there in terms of your in this may be more, I'm not sure if this is your role, you're a forest ecologist, not a forester, but both actually, degrees in both. And I work with this a lot. I work a lot. I should give credit because I'll be quoting some numbers to Meg McClain, who's a UMass professor, you know, and she was my postdoc for a long time and now is going on to do great things all on her own at UMass. And she and I work together a lot on the fate of harvested wood, whether it's harvested for a solar project harvested for a commercial timber or, you know, land clearing in general. So that yeah, so I want to show you something. But before I do, I'll emphasize that like the foregone sequestration is important. But and the stocks are always going to be the most important because they represent 100 odd years of sequestration, right. And so and you deal with them all in one fell swoop. And the foregone sequestration that can't happen because there are no trees anymore, that's just got to be slower because that accumulates slower over time. So the fate of the stocks, as you as you know, it is really important. It is sort of depressing how little ends up in durable goods relative to what one might expect, I think. And I guess I I if your question is specifically about that, I'll answer that. I also have been working on this little demonstration calculator that shows the relative that says if you cut down an acre of forest and you put up an acre of solar, what can you expect to happen? It has all these choices. And I'd love to show that to you to be great. That's our next start on the the the fate of wood I can or that sort of builds in here as one of the one of the questions. I think he can they do connect to each other. The question if you want to address it anyway. But just before I show it, I'll say like with regard to the fate of the harvested wood, because solar is is land clearing and is not commercial timber harvest, we don't get the same data. And I mean, that doesn't maybe, you know, they don't write laws so that so that researchers can get data. But it works out that the the 132 data that is required for each commercial harvest lets us track how much wood was harvested in the fate of it and all that. But when somebody clears land, which is this, which just means it doesn't reforest afterwards, there's no requirement to tell anybody what you did with that wood. And so we have scant knowledge and my my impression, both from I built myself a net zero house out here in Leverett and I've you know worked on these things a lot is that it's hugely variable based on the size of the lot, the the size of the trees and who the land clearing guy knows, you know, like if they can sell a small load to a mill, bringing a lot of equipment in to move logs around and bring it to a mill, it needs to be worth people's time and money. And if there isn't a, you know, a valuable load of logs, then they tend to get chipped on site. You know, and if there's a buck to be made, then folks will put it and it'll end up in a mill, but you're not going to move one log to a mill. You're not going to move a bunch of small stuff to a mill. It'd cost you more to get it there than it would to, you know, than you get in stumpage from selling it. And so anyway, that's hugely variable. So, but so but we can, I'm going to shift now to this calculator. Now you're, it makes me nervous that there's 12 unknown people. So I'm going to say this for everybody. One, this has not been vetted by anybody. I've worked with my research assistant. I trust it in the numbers, but it's not been published. The other thing is I'm, you know, a super nerd. And I don't know if like, so don't be shy here if this doesn't make any sense, you know, like, makes sense to me. But if you're like, I don't get it, what does this mean? Let's just be really vocal and honest, because I could use the feedback because I want this to be a tool that I can provide to the public to be able to work with. But you're the first people to see it is a long way to say it. So here we go. Okay. You see this blue line and everything on here? Yes. Okay. So I'm going to talk about the graph and then I'll talk about the options first. So what we think the blue, you look at the start of the blue line, right? And now we say we're going to convert this is always one acre of forest that we're going to convert to one acre of soil in every all the scenarios. So the first thing that happens is you fell the forest and all this carbon gets emitted. How much of it goes into durable goods is an option we'll pick later, but whatever didn't go into durable goods, we assume that it's emitted immediately, right? That's an assumption it probably should have a decay constant put on it, but it's going to happen fairly fast if they burn or chip it, right? And then you see this slight upward to this line as we come out. Now they haven't built the solar yet. We assume it takes them a year to build the solar and turn it on after we cut it down. So that upward slope is the foregone sequestration associated with that year, right? That continues the foregone sequestration throughout the line, but you don't see it as much because once they turn on the solar, now this trend downward is the amount of carbon that did not get burned to produce electricity on the electric grid. This turns out to be the most important sensitivity in the analysis is what is in the grid. Solar panels do not sequester any carbon by themselves. All they do is mean that you don't need to burn natural gas or worse yet coal or whatever. If the grid is all carbon free energy, if it's all hydro and you build solar, there's no carbon impact of it at all because the solar is just replacing other carbon free energy. So your assumptions about the grid matter more than anything else in this calculation, right? And so here, and then it continues down. Here we have it set to the mass decarbonization roadmap, which says that by the year 2050, we're not burning any more solar. And so this ramp is based off the displacement for that one acre solar array is based on that carbon intensity of electricity in 2050, right? The other pieces built into this. Now, we know that all forests aren't built the same. Well, let me start at the top. The first is the project year, right? So here we say, oh, we're going to build it in 2035, 2025. But if we build it in 2035, it looks like this, right? I'll go back. I just want to, you know, understand these sensitivities. Like, if you build it in 2035, you're never going to win in this scenario. You never get below zero with all of these other pieces. This acres per megawatt, this is a highly debated number. It is. Some people will say it's well established. DOER will say it's well established. It's not, we've done the work. What this means is how many acres of solar does it take to make one megawatt of electricity, a one megawatt nameplate capacity for the panel? Now, DOER is doing their analysis at 3.7. So you can see as I move this around, the impacts really change. Why would it change? Well, if you build solar panels on a slope, you need to space them out more because they shadow themselves. If you build it right, you can't build it right next to the forest because the trees will shadow it. So you have to cut it out. If it were, if the question were only the size of the panels, it would be very easy to figure it out. You would multiply the capacity of the panels by the amount of energy you get, and it's fine. But sometimes you need to build a road. Sometimes you're worried about shadowing. Sometimes you're on a slope. Sometimes you're on a different aspect. So this number turns out to vary somewhere between three and nine. And it's not going to be the same in every situation, right? So let's just put it at five because it really just could be whatever it turns out to be. Now, this is how much forest is in line carbon. Here we have low. So that's the 25th percentile. I went to the forest inventory plots in Massachusetts. There's 575 of them. I took the 25th percentile, the median, the 50th percentile, the 75th percentile. And then I went to the top 5%. Those are our most, you know, anybody cuts down those to make solar, I'm going to be pretty pissed off. We have very few old growth, high carbon sites, right? But this lets you play with that. And then when we're done here, we'll just do a few scenarios. But I want you to understand what, if I were on your committee, these would be the questions I was asking of every site. How are you going to deal with things like this? Downwood is something that nobody ever thinks about, but is a vital component of the woods and that's standing downwood and snags. And so it doesn't, you know, this assumes 10% of the live biomass is dead and that assumes that 20. So it matters and nobody ever calculates it. Soil carbon is my favorite of these in so much as it's so unknown. There's one study out of Spain, right? We know that about half the carbon in a forest ecosystem is above ground and half is below ground, right? In the soil. What's going to happen to the below ground soil when you put a bunch of solar panels on it? Well, we've been running soil warming experiments at Harvard Forest for 35 years. And we know that solar itself operates like a little heat island, like a little urban heat island, because they're dark colored, they absorb and re-radiate heat. And so one might assume that they'll warm up the soil. And if that's true, it'll blow off that carbon in the soil. And so you should be worried about the soil carbon. Other folks say, no, you're going to put this stuff in the shade, you're going to get rid of the wind, you're going to protect it, you're going to lock up that carbon. Truly, we don't know. I don't know. So I have a none and an exponential decay of the soil because we don't know. This is just the state of the research where we are. And here's your durable good fraction. Do we zero percent in durable goods up to 50 percent? You know, 50 percent? I don't know how you're going to get 50 percent. Mostly you're going to get 50 percent if a lot of it ends up in a landfill. And that is truly where most of the long-term forest products that we have even in commercial forestry, I'm sad to say, but where most of it ends up is not in houses or not in beautiful furniture, but in paper that ends up in an anaerobic landfill and sits there for 75 years. It's a pretty pathetic way to store carbon, but you do the math and that's where a lot of carbon ends up. And so again, it's, there isn't like a right answer here. Every site's going to different. Now this is the biggest sensitivity. If we do no change from current, it's almost always better to do solar in a strictly carbon term. You know, this says nothing about biodiversity. It says nothing about water quality, nothing about recreation, just carbon. But if we have a grid that's 70 percent natural gas like it is today, it's all, from a carbon terms, you'd cut down all the forest. You know, it's such a win compared to that. It's only different when we think, Oh, we're going to decarbonize the grid. I'm not going to get into this freeze grid emissions and project here, except to say that I work with an economist who believes that you should only be looking at marginal gains and not be able to propagate them throughout. And so this is a way of saying the year that you build the solar, we should look at the carbon intensity of the grid and the year you build it and not allow the carbon intensity of the grid to change. I disagree with that, but I include it for the same reason I include lots of things that I disagree with because I want people to be able to look at different way. But if you just want to look at the cumulative carbon emissions and cumulative carbon consequences. So that's a lot of talking. Do we want to do a scenario and see how it looks? Go ahead, Janet. Well, let me, can I ask a question first? And I do want to get into some of these other questions as well. But let me say, Jonathan, I've actually dobbled or dobbled in this area as well. And I know Jack, sorry, Dan just did as well in his paper. So this is really interesting to look at and really appreciate the way you presented this and the sensitivity model that you've created here. I do have one question just quickly on the grid, electricity, which is obviously important. I sort of like begs the question. Well, if we have a completely clean grid, then we don't need, we don't go to quote, sort of need the solar, but you don't get a clean grid without the solar. So it's a little bit of a problem. I guess, and my other question then is or related question is, you know, this difference between average emissions and marginal emissions from the grid. So, you know, I think what you're looking at is average emissions. And I'm wondering, you know, whether this is 2020, if we hold it current, it's 2022 from the ISO New England website. What the Yeah, but they have, there's two emission factors they provide, average emissions for the Okay, I assume it's average. I'd have to check. Yeah. And there's also marginal emissions, which is, you know, if you didn't put that last megawatt hour on the grid, then what would have been added instead. And that, I think there's more of an argument to be made there that we're always as we're decarbonizing, we're always displacing natural gas in on the margin, because that's what we're scrubbing out megawatt hour by megawatt hour. So just something that's a great point. And it's a total toggle I could put in for different ways of thinking about it. Yeah. Okay. Great. Let's, let's, you know, we don't have too much time with Jonathan. So let's go through a couple of questions. And I do want to move on to some of the other questions as well that we had for Jonathan. So first, I'll give Laura a chance and then Janet. Okay. So, Jonathan, thanks so much. That was actually really, really helpful. I learned a tremendous amount. I think the first thing is the old growth for us, that would be a shame. Hopefully we can get away to protect those. There's not too much left in Massachusetts. I was going to expand upon your comment of the electricity mix. Aside from ISO New England, you know, your utility, the specific utility you're in is required to give you basically a nutritional label, if you will, for your electricity grid, you know, what you use every year. So that's actually, if you're going to, I don't think you can tailor it to that degree, but this is so interesting, this calculator, to drill down and input your own grid's actual percentages, like what's natural gas. They had this great section called imported power, which they don't have to define. But like digging into what that is, is it large-scale hydro? Is it coal? What is that? So I think that's actually, that's one of the things that's largely overlooked in the dialogue in general, like when people are talking about things like electric cars. Electric cars are great if they're being powered with clean electricity. If they're being powered just connected to the grid, that's fueled, you know, 60% coal, which was the grid I lived in unless you have solar on your roof, it's not as good. So I appreciate that distinction. A couple other pieces. So megawatts per acre, I totally understand why that's a little bit more difficult to, you know, determine. You know, we have sort of our, in the solar development world, we kind of have our metrics. It's very different based on state, you know, where you are. And it's so different based on technology. So I think the one thing we can, you know, all agree on with solar is that the technology keeps improving than like something like 70% over the past and efficiency over the past like 15 years or something. But like, there's a massive distinction, just to give you a basic example of like a fixed tilt solar system versus trackers. Trackers are panels that can basically track the sun, use more power in your panels. They're more expensive, you know, sometimes not the most functional and like really heavy snow areas, but that's really drive that factor as well. So I don't know here. Yeah, just quickly on that, on that point, those are really used a lot in the Southwest where land is not as much of an issue, but with the trackers, you need to space the panels out a lot further. And so actually the megawatts per acre goes in the other direction because they need to be further spaced. And so that they're, we sort of discourage the use of tracking either dual axis or single axis because of how spaced they need to be. So we've done a lot of trackers in the Northeast and these previous work roles I've worked on and what it has allowed us to do is really extract more production right from the panels themselves. So I hear you, but I'm just something to consider. We can talk offline if you want more, but then the piece I'm kind of scratching my head on and I would love more insight is that I think, you know, I think off, you know, off the bat, I would think your assessment of whether or not under the panels is like a heat sink. I think that's how you described it. And when I just think about it logically, you know, and how that would burn off carpet, but then I see like studies and people actually implementing like we worked on a series of like five solar farms in Maryland, where we actually, you know, really combined agriculture underneath those panels. And I would think that if it was so hot underneath the panels, that tomatoes wouldn't be able to grow or, you know, things like that. So I'm just curious, it sounds like that's just an area that's going to, you know, that there's going to continue to be more research. And that's just something that I'm actually going to explore on my own because that's very interesting to me. Yeah, we just got a new NSF grant to do this. What I'm looking for, in case any of you know, is folks who will let me access their ground-mount solar sites, the utilities aren't particularly keen on that. I got some for you. You should follow up on the outline. I have some for you. That'd be great. Yeah, and we're doing some research at UMass on dual use or agrivoltaics where there'll be, obviously those are a little bit different because they're higher up. So maybe a bit different in regime, but we're going to be doing a lot of meteorological monitoring of those sites, temperature, water, and leaf wetness and so forth over the next couple of years. Share that with you. Yeah, we should join forces or something great. Okay. Let's go with Janet and then Dan, and then maybe try to move on. So I think maybe this is understood by others, but I wanted you to say it in lay terms. So what I was hearing you say is depending on when you start your array, the emissions or the savings and emissions changes. So the cleaner the grid or the later you open up your array, you're not replacing oil or coal or natural gas. That number is shrinking. Maybe coal is gone if we're lucky and then oil disappears. But so if you start, say in 2030, and I don't know, half the grid is clean. I'm not sure what the numbers are. The whole equation looks different. So you're losing the carbon removal because you've removed the trees, and then the carbon emissions reductions get less and less, the greener your grid get. Is that what you're saying? Exactly. Yeah. I mean, so because the biggest sensitivity is the amount of the carbon intensity of the grid that you're offsetting with a solar, if you're closer, if the grid is cleaner, then the solar matters less in terms of total carbon. Yes. And the trees are that much bigger, though that's a smaller part of the story. So is there any other green energy that has this thing? So you're clearing land for solar, but if you're doing geothermal, you're just taking heat out of the ground, and I don't think you're releasing that much. If you're doing hydro, you're taking water out. So is there any other green energy technology that's subject to this kind of less emissions or whatever the greener the grid gets? Well, I mean, the question is basically, here we have carbon on both sides of our model, one from forest and other from solar. So the question is, are there other green technologies where you have a carbon consequence to building green energy? I mean, the big one that we need to do with the transmission. So that's basically everything, but we really have an issue around transmission building up the grid. And I actually don't know about hydro and deep water carbon, somebody does, but offshore wind is what I was saying there. There are probably carbon consequences to building big wind turbines, but I'm not aware of what they are. There's substantial impacts on forests in the northern Quebec where they're developing for the hydro. The other thing, those forests, I think, tend to be less carbon sequestration active just because they're more northern and would have less carbon sequestration than a tropical rainforest too. So that's a factor. Okay, thank you. Dan, yeah, great, thank you. Yeah, Jonathan, I'm just saying I really love this calculator and it'd be great to see it as published and made available to the public. Cool. I hope it's to get it on my website and like within a month or something just so people can play with it and beat it up and tell me how to fix it or add more, you know, buttons and dials. Yeah, so that's actually why I had my hand up. So have you considered the impacts of other kinds of land use other than solar when it comes to deforestation? So for example, what would be the carbon impact of putting in a parking lot or a gravel pit? I think a gravel pit is especially relevant here in Amherst because we have over 5700 acres of good sand and gravel deposits in our town. Just as like alternative counterfactuals, I mean the carbon consequences of turning a forest to a gravel pit, that's pretty easy to calculate, right? And it's just all the standing carbon is gone. There's not really anything on the other side of the equation. Well, and then there's the carbon used to mine the gravel as well. Yeah, I mean, I guess I could put that in. It feels like a little bit off the question of what are the forests to solar question. But, you know, well, it is really my model for us to all different land uses. It's just what goes in this calculation. It is extremely important because you can't build a solar development on a protected forest land. So we're only talking about unprotected lands where there's no reasonable expectation that that land remained forest. So what, how does solar compare to other land uses, which you have to expect that that land will eventually be used for some of their use, if not for some. Okay. Okay, great. Yeah. Thanks, Dan. Awesome. Okay. I have till one. Your meeting has things to do and you may want to say goodbye. That's fine. But don't worry about me until one. Okay. I'm good with with a couple more questions following our list, just because I think using your expertise here would be really helpful to us as well. I'm going to stop sharing the calculator unless somebody wants to go back and look at specific scenarios in there. Otherwise, it's more fun to look at you people. Okay. I guess we had another question with regard to it and you are a forest ecologist. So I think this is up your wheelbarrow as well. And this is, you know, the this issue with regard to if, you know, if, if in fact a track of forest within a larger forest, a track of that forest is taken down for solar development. Obviously now looking sort of not so much at the carbon impacts, but on impacts or at least effects on the ecosystem. And, you know, I understand from the limited forestry I've been exposed to sort of just tangentially that, you know, opening up areas and forests and having a grassland or open land can actually have some ecological benefits. Obviously, in terms of ecology, ecological services, obviously putting solar in there is maybe detrimental, but then there are efforts and designs by which solar arrays can, you know, try to bring forth ecological services in terms of pollinator habitat, wildlife habitat, you know, birds and so forth through, through deliberative planting of, of, of certain types of species and so forth. And I'm wondering if you might be able to give us some of your thoughts with regard to, obviously there's some reductions in ecological services of the, of disrupting the forest habitat, but to what extent can some value added, value be added back to the forest by designing solar, you know, larger scale solar arrays that can promote or at least support some ecological services. Yeah, I think there are a lot of ways to mitigate some of the, you know, ecological damages. It's a lot about desired future condition. There's a lot of folks who think there's too little open and grassland and there are certain bird species. This is sort of based on a perspective of Massachusetts based at that thorough time, right, where there weren't a lot of forest and instead there were a lot of bubble links and meadowlarks. And, and if you, if you opine for the agrarian landscape, then solar might get you more of the way there. If you wanted to go back another few hundred years, well, there were no bubble links and there were no meadowlarks because it was a largely closed canopy forest by all accounts throughout. And so it's just, you know, that's just what people want. I don't really have an opinion on it. I think you can manage ecosystems for different outcomes. We've been doing it for ever in, you know, tens of thousands of years, humans have been managing landscapes. And if, you know, if you choose to convert to solar and, you know, there are ways to make them more accessible for wildlife and more beneficial for pollinator species, like, I don't see why we wouldn't do that. That just seems like a great idea. You know, there's a lot of talk about the agrovoltaics. That's great. They seem kind of expensive. And I see they, to me, they make more sense in like a Southwest situation where it's actually too hot and the shade is a benefit to the things you want to grow, because you couldn't grow tomatoes outside of the shade, but now you can grow them under the solar panels. That seems like a great idea. I mean, what we find in the Autobahn study where we work with an energy consultant evolved, we, you know, everybody loves the canopy solar above the parking lot, but they're 8x by some calculation cost differential and embedded carbon within them to build the steel structures to hold those things up to hold the snow and all this. And so then, you know, the energy modelers have the cost built into them. And so when we build it out with the energy models, it's never more than 1%, you know, despite there being 38,000 acres of parking lots in Massachusetts, you know, quite a lot of energy could be produced if we put canopy solar over them. They're so expensive and so hard to build. I feel like agrival takes are somewhere in the middle, like you don't need to like have the quite the buildup that you do. But anyway, you may know more about this than I do. All I'd say is our forests are heavily fragmented generally in, you know, we, I have this whole research project on forest edges, forest edges happen to grow more carbon than interior forests, because they get more light. That's kind of like a one good thing about edges. Ecologically, otherwise, edges are good if you like to hunt, because the species people like to hunt tend to thrive on edges. I hunt, I don't say that as a majority of I'm a deer hunter and I go where edges are. So, but we calculate I have it open here that in Massachusetts, you know, 23% of our forest are within 20 meters of an edge. That's a lot of our forest to be right on an edge. So I don't see much call for the ecological benefit of additional fragmentation of our forest. That feels like kind of a hard argument for me to swallow. Great. Thank you. Yep, Martha. All right. But would you say a little bit about one of Janet's questions of the forest role in water recharge? I mean, you live in Leverett, which probably means you're on a well system. And I know people in a section of Northeast Amherst that are on well water rather than town water are concerned about the impacts, the forest surrounding our heart. So could you talk in general about, you know, how forests help water storage and then what happens? So it's one of these things that will cut both ways. It's like everything I wish I could make a calculation like my I feel like my job as a scientist is to help people understand the complexity. In many ways, removing trees will increase recharges into wells, right? That's because trees transpire a whole bunch of water up into the atmosphere. And that's generally a good thing. And but to simply say like cutting down trees is banned for groundwater isn't the whole story. Some of it is, well, it will allow more water in there. Unfortunately, it will allow a lot of it to go off as surface runoff as well. So yes, you will increase ground recharge. You will also increase surface runoff, which will increase erosion and have a lot of downstream impacts for aquatic ecosystems and things like that. But it's not just one story. There's a story both ways. You know, the one thing that sort of saves us from this, like when I look at the pictures of solar buildout in China, they really go on steep slopes. And that's a really bad idea. Here, the cost, the shadowing of solar, there's almost no solar above eight degrees slope. Like that, that's really where solar builders stop looking at your land, you know, if they're going to come try to lease it. Above that, you have to space them out so much because they shadow each other that it becomes less economic. You get less energy per unit area. And that's a help to your question because it's the steep slopes where the runoff, the water runoff becomes a real problem once you remove the trees. The trees roll and preventing erosion on flat ground is substantial, but nowhere near as substantial as it is on a steep slope. Does that get at some of the things? Yeah. Okay. And then I also just ask, given the choice between, say, your hardwoods, deciduous trees, and pines or other evergreens assuming no insect damage, is one more efficient than the other generally at sequestering? Surprisingly, no. I mean, so leaf area per leaf area, a deciduous tree is more, but conifers have a longer growing season, which offsets the efficiency of the leaves. And that's like an evolutionary trade-off that's pretty cool. Like why deciduousness evolved over evergreen when you have to have a shorter growing season is because they're more efficient, the leaves are more efficient at sequestering carbon, but they do it more shortly. And if you think about it, when I showed those lines, when the hemlock forest was healthy, it was roughly parallel with the hardwood forest. And that speaks to sort of these trade-offs that they sort of went out. And were they not equivalent, evolution would have, one of them would have been out of the story, right? And that's sort of the game of ecology is be efficient, at least as efficient as your neighbor, or you won't hang out very long. Okay. Thank you. Great. Thank you. All right. Anybody else? Jenna, is that a new hand? Sorry. So I don't know if you can answer this question, but I do want to say my, the field behind my house is a bobbling factory. So we're taking, I mean, like insane. So, and the farmer doesn't cut until after everybody's fledged and anything, which is nice. So I don't know if you can answer this question. And I think the answer is probably no. But, you know, is there, if you were going to cut into forests, is there sort of, and you wanted to have the least impact, is there some size of the array, like 10 acres, 15 acres, five acres, 50, or, you know, if you had 10 acres, is it good to buffer it with 10 more acres before the next one or whatever? And so, you know, I've been talking to some planning directors about, because, you know, Belcher town has a maximum of 15 acres. Like, where did you get to that number? And I wonder if there's some basis of that, like, is five acres too much? Or I know it's a, I know it's a question that, you know, is there some minimum size that's has the I'm going to give this annoying on the one hand on the other hand answer again. But the, so I don't think there is a magic number. It's a bunch of trade-offs, right? The landscape ecologists like me have debated this, you know, single large or several small, in terms of habitat, since the beginning of time, it's called the sloss debate, it even has an acronym. Usually we're talking about habitat reserves, but degradation or habitat loss has the same debate. Is it better to lose a big one chunk, or to lose little pockets of an equal area in small pieces? And the answer is just it depends. I think for me, it would be like, if the considerations I would have is you want to increase the energy intensity of the project. And if you created more shadowing and more access roads and more like ancillary damage to make many small ones, I'd prefer one big one, just because I think you'd have to produce the same energy plausibly have to impact less ground, right? Just because of all the extra building, you know, infrastructure to get to several small ones versus one infrastructure from one big one. But after that, it becomes trade-offs with what what you're most concerned with in terms of the damage. I think a lot of that's aesthetic, too. Like people don't like the ones that just seem to go on forever is what is my impression. I'm just kind of guessing their idea, I should say. So the answer is no. At first, I thought you were going to ask me, like, is there some forest that we better off to cut than other forests? And to that, I'd say, you know, younger trees, smaller, less carbon, because the stocks are more important than the sequestration. And while it's true that young forests sequester a little bit more carbon per year than an old forest, that difference is small compared to the difference in stocks between a very young forest and a very old forest. And so in terms of carbon, I would just go for the smaller forest first or disincentivize by, you know, taxing or whatever based on the amount of carbon removed, you know, so that people would pay more to take big trees down or something like that. But I'm no policymaker. I don't don't look to me to make a policy. Well, you do have some insights into policy because you've been hanging out with the EA groups. I have, but I drive them crazy. But I do. And let me, let me see what Chris, if you wanted to ask a question, that'd be great. Excuse me, I had a trouble unmuting. Anyway, I wanted to just confirm that you said that most solar installers would prefer not to install solar on a slope that's over eight degrees. You didn't say percent, you said degrees, right? Yes, I said that and I'm like 90%. Sure, that's right. But now I want to check because you got me nervous. But I have this histogram of the 9,000 acres of, because we had to put something into our model. And I believe it was, I could almost slack my research assistant. She is the one who did the math, but I, well, I'm pretty sure it's eight degrees and not 8%. But can I follow up on that rather than get that wrong? I'm sorry. That'd be great. Yeah, thank you. Because it just, it matters. Okay, thanks. Great. And maybe we can finish up with one last question, which is maybe to draw on any insights you have from the state process going on. And, you know, as I sort of laid out, we laid out in the question we had put forward to you, obviously, you've been involved, as you mentioned, with the EA Energy Environmental Affairs and working through the carbon plans. And as you say, there's always tradeoffs here. And in this case, you know, the tradeoffs that I presume the state is grappling with is that we want to, for various purposes, but in addition for this net zero and this extra 15% or whatever we need to get from our forests, in terms of meeting our net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, we want to put as much forest in, secure as much forest as possible in preservation or other ways to make sure those forests provide their services. But at the same time, it's pretty clear that the state is looking for 25, 35 gigawatts of solar to be installed in the commonwealth, as you say, to reduce these fossil fuel emissions, which are sort of primary in ways with regard to our carbon plan. So, do you have any insights? And, you know, especially with your comments that, you know, parking lot canopies are great, but they're eight times as expensive and rooftops more expensive and so forth. Do you have any insights without, you know, going beyond what you can share? Yeah, so the DOAR is running a parallel study to what I'm doing with mass autobahn and we serve on their technical advisory committee and vice versa, it's not happening in a silo. And then I'm doing these other solar runs for EEA as part of the land sector analysis. And so I'll say like all of a sudden we're all integrated and everybody's trying to work. That's important to me because when I wrote the land sector plan for 2020, I never saw the energy plan. I never saw it. When I read that they wanted up to 200 square miles ground-based solar, I was like, have it been good to know to put into my plan because we never saw each other. Everybody handed it in the day before it was due and there was no coordination. And so if it feels like one hand wasn't talking to the other in the decarb, it's because we weren't. We had no communication. So I'll say things are much further along and what's fun for me is evolve the energy consultant I'm working with with autobahn is the energy consultant who I didn't know but was working on this before, but we have a lot of the same models and working off the same assumption. So that's coming around. DOER's study is much more of a technical potential study and isn't talking about, though they do, I don't know if you've seen any of their early releases, but they do prioritize based on some of the same factors we do like Biomap 3 and TNC resilience layers and then they grade everything a bit like Amherst did for their own where each parcel gets like an ABC grade and then they have scenarios after that. They don't run a cost model and they don't run a way to, our cost model incorporates the incentives, the state incentives, the federal incentives and builds things out and then when it's not economic it imports energy from out of state. Their study just sort of gets the 30 gigawatts come hell or high water, you know, and without any costs around it or anything so, you know, I'm biased but I like our study better. Our study cost more and took longer to do so, you know, it's fair. The natural and working land stuff in the CECP, I have input on that, but a lot of people have input on that. The tension there isn't so much around the solar and it's not really tension but where the state still seems to be lacking consensus we'll say and now I'm trying to be careful is on commercial forestry, not on solar. I think we all agree that we're going to try to find a way to get the solar in a way that minimizes impacts to natural and working lands and I think you'll see that we can get a hell of a lot of solar without impacting very many forests, you know, how we incentivize to do that but we can show you that there are, you know, easily 40,000 acres in the state that are on lands that would have very little ecological impacts so can we prioritize those but all of these modeling exercises assume some benevolent dictator but that's not, you know, we live in a free market with private property owners and so somebody needs to back up benevolent dictator models with strong economic incentives to get private landowners to operate in a way that moves the solar to the land that would be best suited for it otherwise you'll have what we have now which is, you know, in my mind some energy companies who are pretty abusive to landowners and small communities who don't have resources to hold sessions like this but instead are just looking for the first economic activity in their town to come around in a long time and why do they want to say no to that and what's, you know, so anyway trying to deal with some of more predatory energy installers out there would be a early incentive for me. Anyway that's a bit of a ramble but where things stand in my mind on the state stuff. I know you'll be hearing more from Hoffer and the climate chief on plans for commercial forestry and natural working lands in the next week or so. There'll be an announcement. Thank you. That's good insights. Thank you, Jonathan. Janet and then Laura, you're muted, Janet. Good Lord. How many years am I going to do that? So you said that you've found, I'm not, you personally found 40,000 acres of land in the state that could take solar with minimum environmental impacts. What would be the qualities or characteristics of that land? They're mostly developed open lands, you know, so they're non forested open land. I mean, people are going to have to swallow more small panels in open areas, including people with five acres of lawn that would have to move to solar. They'd have to be a lot of hickory ridge type habitat, but we can show on the maps that it exists. We don't go to like little quarter acre parcels or anything. We're not crazy, but we do go to, you know, if it's bigger than an acre and it's open lawn and it's not like a cemetery and it's not a playground and it's not a sports field, but it's open, that's the land that we're targeting first. I mean, the ideal situation is like landfills, but most of those have been done or they've not been done for a good reason. And so it's kind of the next step, you know, that all the brown fields are in there and everything, but it's a lot of a lot of open land. Are you looking at like farm soils and, you know, so all problem soils are screened out in that. There's no, you know, at the risk of scooping our own study, like we have different scenarios and the sort of 40,000 acres is what we think across the whole state you could find without much controversy, except from folks who don't like looking at them, but like not controversy from a habitat perspective or anything like that, but like whether everybody wants them in their backyard or not is a good question. Okay, thank you. Okay, Laura, and then we can bring this to a close. Just a couple points there. So Jonathan, what strikes me is, and this always strikes me when you obviously have a lot of expertise in your field. And, you know, then on the other hand, you have these really good solar developers, not the destructible ones mentioned in Massachusetts who are doing their own internal private studies. And that includes like all like the commercial viability of solar projects. And what, you know, sometimes I feel like I'm having these calls with different partners throughout the country. And one of those large developers who've been around for a long time with tremendous success, just kind of offhand said, well, yeah, the smart program in Massachusetts is, you know, has its restriction. Like basically there's, you know, aggressive subtractors if you developed on forested land and had to cut trees and some tractors for green fields, you know, adders for other things. But they basically said based on their analysis, and this is what they do for a living, there's 10 to 15% of land available in Massachusetts or solar under the smart program. But when I hear that figure, I'm like, whoa, that's not a lot, given, you know, the conversations we're having here. And I'm wondering, in your work and across the board, how often is it going to be a beautiful marriage is if you were sitting next to a Borrego or, you know, a next amp and saying, here's what I'm seeing, what are you seeing? Because, you know, one of these other developers in Mass was just saying, they've been developing this project, I think it's like five megawatts. They started developing it six years ago. It's going to reach notice to proceed in 2025. And it's not going to be interconnected until another two to three years after that. And that's largely because of the utility, the interconnection delays. So, I mean, I think there's like the, and I appreciate the balance of this, and I certainly don't have all the answers, but I am far more familiar with the commercials and things and what work someone does in. And when I hear the 10, 15%, even if you take 15%, that's not a lot. So 750,000 acres. Well, I mean, this is including this is land that is possible to develop. So you're automatically removing conservation land in all the lands that are already removed. And they're looking at actual projects and their major analysis is based on interconnection. Where is the grant not totally bogged down? And where don't we have to cut down trees? Right. So I'm just so we have a guy from Borrego on our technical advisory committee. And, you know, and I, we do seek out their input, because it's like, we can sort of, for all the reasons you say, the interconnect issue is what I hear all the time. And I don't, I don't know what, what, if anything, you know, I don't, it's a problem for me when I'm doing these spatial models, right? I assume that the interconnect today are driving the location a lot of these sites. And like, if we don't fix the interconnect problem, then we're in big trouble. And so yeah, I mean, that's a real weakness. And my impression is, is you could put us next to each other and that still wouldn't solve the problem. There's some inherent uncertainties that are difficult to overcome. Yeah, I guess the other person and the technical group in my perfect world would be someone from the utility, you know, saying, hey, you know, okay, so you have your position, the developers have their position and then what do, what do their maps say? Because it would be amazing to have a statewide plan that says here are the great places for solar and utility. Can you give some incentive here to like fast track these projects to get through? Because otherwise, based on that, we're gonna be waiting another in total 10 years to get a five megawatt project interconnected. Right. Yeah, I don't, you know, we don't, anecdotally, I don't hear that they're walking away yet, but it does seem just a matter of time before the delays are so long that we don't have, we don't have an issue anymore, whether it's a good issue or a bad issue. It's just a non-issue, right? Yes, exactly. People stop doing work in Massachusetts, I agree. Yeah. Okay, thank you. Let me bring this to a close, because this has been a great conversation. And let me thank you, Jonathan, on behalf of all of us for your time and your insights. We recognize you're a neighbor and close by, and you did offer some additional opportunity to reach out to you. And at any time, this is fun. And I've learned a ton. And if it, you know, if anybody wants to follow up on ideas, I didn't have time to do any like homework on you guys. And so the whole time I'm sort of like, I don't know what, you know, where you guys are coming from or like, and you're like, oh, I'm doing research on this too. If there are ways to work on this, I'm just interested in this stuff. All right, great. Great. Thank you so much for your time, your insights here and for your work in this area. Martha, I want to say something before we said goodbye or no. Sorry. Okay, didn't see the hand. Okay, I just, I just wanted to suggest that the next thing we do perhaps would be to invite the public comment now, since it's, well, we have a couple of things, and then we're going to do public comment at 115. Okay, I got to get on another zoom. Thank you very much. Another project. Thank you so much, Jonathan. Take care. Bye now. Yeah, bye bye. Okay, great. All right, good. I do suspect at this point we're not going to have time to go through our main work of this group, which is the next to work with Chris through the additional drafting and revisions that she's done. So Chris, if that's okay, I think I'd rather go through just staff updates, member updates, and then public comments. I think it'll be time at that point. And then we'll, we'll really dedicate pretty much all of the next meeting. I don't think we have any guest speakers. Do we, Stephanie? Coming up. No, not for the next meeting. I think that's fine. I think I will give a more whole presentation next time. I tried to put things together a little bit more this time, but I didn't quite have time to finish what I meant to do. So the next time I will have had time to finish what I meant to do, and I think it'll be more productive anyway. So that works out fine for me. Okay, great. And let's try to make tracks on that in two weeks' time. So with that, let me go back to the early part of the agenda, which is staff updates. So anything to update on, Stephanie, on your end? Just that Adrienne is working on the initial draft of the report, and I believe on the meeting for the 28th, I know that the ECAC would like to have her come to their meeting on the 26th. So we're actually starting that meeting a half hour early, just to be able to squeeze her in. But I know that she would be available to also come to the meeting for the solo bylaw working group as well, I think on the 28th that same week. Great. That would be our next meeting. So we'll have some time with that, but then we'll get on to the bylaw, the work from Chris. And we could, I mean, again, tentatively, you could start the meeting a bit earlier just to sort of give that time, even if it were 15 minutes earlier. So it doesn't disrupt too much of what Chris is working on. Well, while we're on that topic, would people be open and available to start at 11 instead of 1130 to give us a little bit longer time on the 28th? Do I hear any conflicts there? I'm going to be out that day, so I won't be able to join. Okay. In either case, though. Okay. Okay. All right. Let's plan on that. If that's, you can do that, Stephanie, in terms of just as long as you let the public know that we'll be starting. It's just the posting. Yeah, the posting. Okay. So why don't you mark your calendars for that? And we'll plan to start at 11 and start off with the GZA update. Great. Thank you. Okay. Anything else, Stephanie? No, I think that's the most pertinent thing. Awesome. Okay. Janet, do you have an update on that or a comment on that? I don't really, I don't have a planning board update, but I was wondering if this comes in ECAC or just in, so there's a solar forum that UMass Clean Energy Extension is sponsoring with some other groups. And I was wondering like when, if we, people from here could go to that and when it's going to be held, because is it as early as May? Because it feels like I almost wish our committee started now because there's so much coming in from the state level and so many changes. And that forum seems like it's all the stuff that we're doing. So I just wondered if that's going to start and can we, can members jump in? Well, I'll let you know I'm front and center on that forum with the Clean Energy Extension and we're really excited about it. It's something that our state, our delegation, Senator Comerford and Mindy Dahm, have been working with us on and our co-hosting. We have a steering committee. We're working on an agenda, but we did make the decision just a couple weeks ago that we are going to not do this in May or June, I think was the tentative date, but we're going to do this in September. We needed the extra time and we didn't want to do it over the summer. And so yeah, there will be more. I mean, everybody's invited. It's a public public event, but definitely will let this committee and Stephanie know to advertise it as well. But it's open. It's really, it's not Amherst focused. It's Western mass focused and but people across the state will be involved or invited to participate as well. Okay. But before we go to staff updates, Chris, any, sorry, member updates? Chris, did you have any other updates on just on the staff generally? I don't have any updates other than to say two things, which is one that our new planner is really excellent and he's taking a lot of the weight off of the rest of us. And two, I wanted to say how much I appreciated Jonathan's presentation and answering questions. I thought he was really excellent and he seems to have a pretty moderate point of view about things and he's got a lot of information to offer. So we may want to ask him questions in the future. Thank you. Thank you. Agreed. Okay. Any member updates, particularly as it relates to other committees? I will let folks know though I'm blocking on the details, maybe Stephanie knows eCAC will be having a public forum at our next meeting on heat pumps, if I recall. Nope, sorry. It's electric vehicles by the Green Energy Consumers group. So, but it's a one-hour presentation on EV's information for potential buyers, information about EVs in general, and that will be held during a regular eCAC meeting which starts at 4.30, but that educational piece begins at 5.30. And it'll be, it's already posted. Okay. In the community calendar. Yes. Okay. On the 26th, I think it's you. Thank you, Stephanie. Yep. Okay. Anybody, any other updates from committees or other walks of life? All right. Great. Okay. With that, let's, we do have a great public attendance today. Oh, there it is. 10 in the, in the, in the meeting. So I want to give opportunity for public comment that we can hear. So, Stephanie, do you want to open that up to anybody who'd like to make a public comment? Sure. Anyone interested in making a comment or asking a question, please electronically raise your hand and I will allow you to speak. Jack Hirsch, you can go ahead and unmute. Hi. Thanks a lot. I don't often attend your meetings. This was really interesting. I was really glad to hear Jonathan's proposal. I was rather amazed to hear how much disturbed land there is in Massachusetts that's possible for solar development because the numbers I always heard were very low. So this gave me some, some, you know, hope. But my question is actually quite different. The big downside of solar is, of course, the footprints required. And secondly, the efficiency lifetime of the panels. And I'm wondering if you guys are doing any research to look into either a miniaturization of the solar panels or alternative ways to produce energy that may be coming close to the market so that we don't have to consider, you know, destroying a whole huge swath of forest and make those trade-offs. Yeah. I mean, offhand, I think that research to that extent of sort of new technologies is beyond the scope of this committee. That being said, obviously that takes place in the marketplace and such technologies, if and as they become commercially viable, will potentially displace the needs for other energy sources, solar and potentially others. So, you know, I'm not, just offhand, I'm not aware of these technologies that, you know, are sort of on the close horizon. Obviously, in terms of the decarbonization roadmap, it's really focused on solar offshore wind and large-scale hydro sort of, and battery storage all working in tandem. But always looking out for new approaches. And Jack, let me just clarify and ask there, the number, the acreage, the large number of acreage of land that Jonathan had referred to that were not available for solar that was not forested, was not disturbed land, as I understood it, but was open land, which means it's not, it still can be some nice aesthetically pleasing open land as well. If I think that, I think I understood that correctly. I believe he was referring to lawn is what I heard. Yeah, everything from lawns to just open fields. I mean, I'm not sure if like our town commons would be included in that in terms of his mapping. We would not be able to do that. No, I'm not saying we. I just don't want people to panic. But I'm just not, yeah, exactly, but I'm just saying I'm not sure exactly what filters he had in that, in his, in that calculation. I mean, we'll have to wait for the details to come out from his, I think that was part of the mass autobahn study. Okay, anyone else interested in asking a question or making a comment? Lenore Brick, you can go ahead and unmute. Hey everybody, thanks for inviting Jonathan. I just want to ask Dwayne. Dwayne, I'm so interested in that solar farm at UMass. Is there a way to let us know the details about it before the invitation goes out just in general, just like in the planning process? I would just appreciate that. That's just on the side. Yeah, well, just keep it in your hopper. You don't have to answer now. Just if you send me an email, I can let you know, but basically it's a forum. I can tell you that, you know, tentatively, at least right now, it's a forum that's going to be divided up into four different sessions, probably two hours each tentatively scheduled for the four Tuesdays in September around the noon hour, but I'm not sure. Yeah, that's an email you. I don't want to take time from the center. But that wasn't my comment. So, you know, I just want to preface this by saying whenever, you know, us humans hear information, we perceive it according to our, you know, biases based on our history, based on blah, blah, blah, right? So I'm so I some of the things that I heard that are not that don't might not rise to the top that Jonathan was talking about was so many unknowns, right? In the carbon metrics, like how it's evolving, how it's still flawed because we have so many knowledge gaps, how we don't really understand the not only the carbon sequestration in the soil, but all of the impacts of disturbing the soil matrix, how we don't really understand how climate derangement and biodiversity collapse are intertwined with each other and you can't really address them in isolation, how we don't understand the future of if we get rid of X amounts of forest, what is that going to do to the health of the planet in the future, how we don't really understand how things are just still in recovery from going from old growth forest to farming to, you know, to newer forests, how there's disagreement in the field about durable products, about soil health, about early succession habitat, about fragmented forests. So I just I just think it's something to, we can't tackle all that obviously, but something to keep in mind when we're drafting a bylaw and also to keep in mind that the state isn't flux, there's a new administration, there's a new climate chief and there might be new added state incentives which might change the landscape a little bit and that would be interesting to understand how that impacts us in small towns and the power that we have and how we're part of a bigger hopefully regional plan. I was very heartened to hear Jonathan saying there's a little more integration and coordination that they used to be at because I see so much of what there isn't in that regard. So anyway, just my two cents for today. Thank you so much. Thank you, Lenore. And anyone else? Renee Moss, you can go ahead and unmute. Yeah, I was going to say things that have actually already been said, but I just want to emphasize what Lenore just said in terms of a regional perspective. You know, I hope that the state moves in that direction because it just seems like as we look at this as town by town, we have these like arbitrary, you know, border lines for towns and, you know, to hear Jonathan say that there were 40,000 acres of open land, whatever that means, you know, we all heard it slightly differently. But that when you think of it like that, we're thinking about it in a very regional perspective. And I would hope that as we look at our, you know, quest for righteous sustainability, we begin to look at things through a more regional lens. And, you know, hopefully the forum in the fall, Dwayne, can focus on a regional perspective because as towns and as a region, we need to come together, we need to see this as something we need to do together and not just do it town by town. Anyway, yeah, and thank you that Jonathan's presentation was very appreciated. And I think that's all I have. Thank you, Renee. Okay. And Eric Barcroft, you can go ahead and unmute. Thank you so much. And as you probably know, I'm an active avid follower of this committee and ECAC and all things solar and forest and town. And I very much appreciated Jonathan's perspective today. What I've always been kind of, what has always been stuck in my throat is the concept of expense. Even though Dr. Thompson cited that it's eight times more expensive to build parking lot canopies, I have to question how we quantify expense and is not losing by our biodiversity, is not losing the potential for further water purification and also of course the sequestration of carbon that is already there. What can we put a dollar figure on that? We've already noticed an extreme reduction within our ecosystem and the biodiversity of our local ecosystem. Used to drive down on a summer night and get your windshield would be just smeared with insects and we're losing a drastic percentage of our insect population as a result, our bird population. So what are we, what can we begin to think of? I believe everybody here and many people, most people believe we need both, but we've not been able to quantify the cost of supplanting our forests with a solar field. So I would urge us to really use the word expensive very carefully because on one hand we can calculate a cost, but on another hand we know there's a cost, but we've not really done the calculated it and for generations to come we would experience these kind of expensive costs to our ecosystem and our water purification. So I know it's a very, it's a difficult subject to come to terms with, but I think it's, I would, I do appreciate us wrestling with the idea though. Thank you. Great, thank you, Eric. Yep. And anyone else? All right, hearing none, let's get ready to adjourn here. I don't think, I think we'd all appreciate the 10 minutes back and no need to jump into anything, anything else at this point. So any final thoughts or comments from the, from the committee before we adjourn and keep in mind that we'll meet next in two weeks, but start at 11 instead. Maybe Stephanie will confirm that I presume Adrian can join us at that time, but we'll confirm. Yeah, okay. Yep, Janet and then Lara, she's muted. You're muted, Janet. I couldn't say that I wasn't. So I was a great meeting. I really enjoyed hearing from Jonathan Thompson and the questions and sort of helped me and I'm looking forward to the GZA reports. I think that's going to be really just information dense. I, at the last meeting said I would send like a summary of some of the farmers and farm folk like belated farm people I'm talking to and I didn't do that. And so I could do that. And I sort of think that when we talk to people who are like working on the ground on the issues that were involved and it really helps. And so I just wanted to hear from other committee members like, you know, I have two farmers that have sort of different points of view. I think we have to learn more about dual use, particularly in Massachusetts and I'm sure Laura has some, you know, maybe some people she can send us. And I was thinking about like either NOFA, the Northeast, I can't remember the Organic Farming Association or CISA, like someone from there because they've been looking at the issue. And then I'm blanking on the fourth, like, and I don't know if I had a structure as a meeting, but just have people talk about the different issues facing farmers, dual use and solar. And, you know, I've brought this up, but I just wonder if we could just pull the committee and say, yeah, I'd be interested in that and I could try to put together a little vignettes on everybody or different people. I think I actually have like eight possible people and that wouldn't be a great meeting, but I think some people who work the land and work with people that work the land would be helpful. So I just wondered what other people thought. Why don't we put that in a parking lot there and hear what Laura and Martha has to say, and then we can take that up. I was just going to say thanks to Dan for sending that paper, because I thought it was great. I know it didn't take, it took some time to put together, so I thought that was really valuable. And thanks for bringing that speaker. I think that was a valuable perspective. My only concern, I'll just respond to Janet's proposal. I want to make sure, and I think I've said this, it's not like a broken record, is that I think we, we've got a lot of good information. And two things. First is, I really want to make sure you're allocating enough time to actually reuse the biome and craft the biome, because as summertime comes, schedules are going to be hit or miss. We're all, I had vacations planning and trip and oil steps here as well. And September is not that far away. That's, I think this meeting was great, but we haven't talked about the language today. And then the second thing is, I think if we are making a decision to bring in speakers to represent different opinions to this group, I would also like to bring in a developer's perspective. Because I think we're, we spend a lot of time talking about, I would love to be able to say, we're all commanders in chief of where solar goes and embers, irrespective of, you know, the connection, kind of the property, all of these things. But I think I've tried to represent the real concerns that I know developers are having. And perhaps it would be better to see if you've heard it from them themselves. But, you know, what I hear consistently across the board is, well, we are being restrictive, you know, to a certain extent, about where solar goes. They are extremely limited about where it could actually go. So what I don't want to end up with is like a suggested map that basically means there's no solar embers. So that's just my only, those are my two cents. Great. Martha. Yeah. So my, my suggestions on, on the, the farming and, and their upcoming schedule, I would say from the investigations I've started to do on farming, I think that the information we need, it would be very specific to Amherst in the sense that, okay, you know, we have, what are the lands we have that are already under APR? What lands would be possibly open? And in that case, what kind of farming is done there? Would they even, would they even be useful for, you know, dual use based on what the specific farmers want? And is there anything then that impacts the language that we use in the bylaw that relates to farming? I think that that's what we would want to know from farmers would be anything specific to the bylaw in terms of either restrictions or encouragement that would be germane to what our very local farmers grow on what kinds of soil and so on. There's a gradation in the soil quality between North and South Amherst, for example, and gradation in, you know, orchards in the South or other things. So that's what I would like to know. And I could see, foresee that being a little bit downstream as we are involved in that section of the bylaw, maybe we could plan it in conjunction with a, with a specific work on the bylaw. So that's my suggestion. And the same with anything else like Laura's suggestion of, you know, gee, we need to understand from the developers the challenges of, you know, where the electrical grid works or, you know, is accessible or different things like that. I think we should do it in a way that's focused to the specific requirements we're putting in the bylaw for a certain section. So maybe I might even suggest that that Chris might be the one to say when a particular section of particular topics might be most helpful. So that's my two cents. Appreciate that, Martha. I would tend to agree with that. I think, and Laura, in terms of let's focus on language and bring in some expertise when we're grappling with language with regard to how we want to move in a certain direction. You know, I would certainly suggest, Jen, if you have some farmers that you want to accumulate their perspectives in some written comments, then they can be brought forward to the committee. But, you know, I think I'm not sure, I'd rather not spend the time quite at this point unless we have specific questions that we're grappling with to bring in specific farmers. I will say that I'm doing quite a bit of work, the Clean Energy Extension. We have a USDA grant on dual use and agriboltaics. I can offer perspectives from my understanding of the technology, what's going around in the country, and the knowledge I have from DOER and MDAR with regard to how they're trying to look at dual use for the Commonwealth. Okay, Stephanie. Yeah, so I just wanted to point out that you have a solar assessment report coming soon that's going to have a breakdown with some of the land use categories. So some of Martha's questions are actually going to be at least addressed in that report. So I don't think, and you're only looking at a third of the community, not the whole community. So I think, you know, that report will be helpful to you and, you know, should be available within the month, I believe. So, and I think at the mapping, the ideas that the mapping will be available around that time as well, which will also be a useful feature for you to look at some of these, you know, ask some of these questions and look at the mapping tool. Yeah, yeah, a good point for sure, Stephanie. Okay, so with that, now that we don't have any time to give back, I suggest we adjourn the meeting. I agree, appreciated Jonathan's perspectives and and knowledge that he provided to us today, and and everybody's contribution. So with that, let's adjourn the meeting, and we'll reconvene again in two weeks. And Stephanie will let us know the exact time. Thanks, everyone. Thanks. Enjoy the nice weather.