 I'm a cooperative extension specialist in ecological restoration at the University of Arizona and I promise you purposely made this like super opaque like what am I going to talk about tonight, but it's going to be awesome. And so before I start talking about what I'm going to talk about I want to tell you a little story so as a cooperative extension specialist probably or hopefully most of you are aware that cooperative extension has to work with stakeholders to help address their management goals. Okay, so I work with a lot of stakeholders in the state of Arizona, farmers, ranchers, backyard gardeners, BLM government, all kinds of folks to help them solve their land management concerns like that. So one of the things that I heard a lot when I was going around talking to people was that there was no sort of single source, single resource that folks could go to if they questions about restoration there's lots and lots of stuff out there right but there's no one place that people could go that Arizona.edu right down and it's this one stop shopping online in place for all the resources you might need if you want to do restoration in there. Okay. And so there's all kinds of information about kinds of cool stuff and people love and then folks started going to the site and they're like you know what we need, we need local resources we'd love if there was a map, and we could click County on the map and find local resources of seed purveyors and all the resource map, it does exactly what I just said so you can click on one of the counties and you get local resources. People saw this and they were like that what dude a is doing down the road in terms of land management it would be really awesome if there was a map that had descriptions of local restoration projects, so that I can go and check and see what people did and learn from other people. And I was like that is a great idea. So I created this really nice form for folks that you know ask them information about their restoration project. And then I sent it out to, I don't know, something like 500 people that I interact with fairly often. Okay, and I waited, and I waited, and these forms weren't coming back what was coming back to me were emails that people are like this is awesome. This is awesome. This I love this effort but you know I'm not comfortable talking about my recent restoration efforts because this thing failed, or oh this is awesome I can't wait to see this but I have nothing to contribute because the last couple things didn't exactly hit the mark we wanted. And over and over again, I kept hearing from people who are like, This is something we need I want to know what other people are doing but I don't want to share my work, because stuff didn't come out perfectly. And what I thought was really weird about this whole thing is that stuff often doesn't come out perfectly right particularly not in restoration and revegetation right restoration reclamation revegetation is really really hard to do. So rarely do we meet all of our benchmarks right, we might be successful in some areas, but not in others. And in addition to that we are human, and to air is human to forgive divine by Alexander Pope like we make mistakes, right. But I think a major issue in our field is that we don't talk about our mistakes. Okay, and if we don't talk about our mistakes, we can't help, we can't learn from one another. Okay, we're going to be reinventing the wheel. And then we are not talking other people about our mistakes, and then hearing back from them and then maybe helping us solve some of our challenges. Okay. So, what I want to do today is talk all about mistakes, and I'm going to talk about my own mistakes, and Alexander Pope is going to help me and if you guys don't know who Alexander Pope was he was this sas that kind of famous but he also was really into gardening so I just like Wikipedia like wormholing and I learned more about Alexander Pope than I ever thought I would but Alexander Pope was going to help me talk all about how I messed up and hopefully at the end of this talk you don't walk away with being like wow she is terrible at her job. I hope you walk away with something like oh okay people mess up, and there are things you can learn from it and now I'm going to be a little more comfortable talking about it, because I really think there needs to be like a regime shift in our field, where we start becoming more comfortable talking about our mistakes now I understand. This is a little weird right sometimes if you're being paid to do restoration you don't want to lose clients right you don't look better if you're in research right you need to come out with positive results so you can publish them and then get your next promotion. So I get all that, but I think we need to be a little more forthcoming with what doesn't work for us so that other people can learn from our mistakes and also so that we can develop more of a sort of culture of sharing. So that we can also learn how to do things better. Okay, so what I'm going to do tonight is I'm going to tell you all about how I messed up in lots of things that I've done. I'm going to talk to you about how I've made assumptions about what works. I'm going to talk to you about how I haven't accommodated for some uncomfortable truths ecological truth, and then how I've overlooked simple for fancy which is like the worst, the worst. Okay. And first, I'm going to talk about how making assumptions about what works, and I'm not terrible at my job I swear. Okay, so I work in Arizona. Mostly I work in desert grassland systems which are super arid and there's some of the hardest to restore successfully. And there's lots and lots of reasons just like probably any place that you guys do ecological restoration. There's like a litany of things that are keeping you from being super successful with your restoration right and in arid land systems this is just a list of some of them right weeds soil types may context dependency. And rain comes soil chemistry all this stuff there's tons of things that can block us from being successful in air and systems however precipitation is by far the dominant thing. Okay, if you don't have rain plants don't live long it's like this you know common thing so precipitation is super important and this was highlighted in this recent paper by Nancy Shackleford and colleagues where she took all kinds of published studies on ecological restoration in arid land systems and look what they found as you go up in a ridity index so as you get more water, restoration success increases. Oh my God. And so this wasn't too surprising but it just shows something that we kind of all know right, but something else that this study also showed was that lots of the things that we make decisions about who to put down how much to put down when to put down where to put those things are really really important for driving success also not particularly surprising right. So this is showing for example as you increase seed rate, you get more plants, who to know. As time goes by you have less plants things die and the bigger the seed mass the more plants are going to have okay so this stuff is pretty well known but this is highlighting that after precipitation for the most part decisions or or the the decisions you're making the things you're doing on the ground are really important, or are they. So I did a study and when I say I almost everywhere here it's going to be someone else so it's going to be mostly my students in my postdoc so anything you really like probably someone else did anything that you're like this is garbage I probably did but Hannah Farrell was a PhD student of mine and she was working on a natural gas pipeline in the altar valley in Arizona which is ultra valleys about 45 minutes southwest of Tucson. And this natural gas pipeline got installed and what they did is they first scoured the top five inches of topsoil. So all that delicious topsoil that's got the organic material in the seeds and all that stuff they scoured it all and they put it to the site. And then they dug the trench they put in the pipeline. They covered the trench and then they put the topsoil back. Okay, so Hannah. Oh, and this is what it looked like it looked like a moonscape. And this was in an area that was graced. Okay, so Hannah was interested in understanding what restoration approaches might be important for successful re vegetation of this natural gas pipeline. So she had a couple of different treatments she had this topsoil treatment so remember the company that installed this they took the five inches of topsoil. They scoured it all that's exactly how they did it. I don't know they use the machines they scoured it all they put it to the side and after they installed the pipeline, they put it back. Okay, so she had just a topsoil treatment topsoil and seed. So we asked the local ranchers about what kind of native forage they liked and we created a forage mix and we put out native seed. And then we had a livestock exclusion treatment. I'm going to talk about the livestock exclusion treatment that's not kind of part of where I want to go. But if you're interested in that I can talk to you about it later. Okay. So this is what she found now there's a lot going on here but I'll orient you to the graph so on the top graph we have plant species richness on the bottom graph we have total vegetation cover, and I just three things listed on each graph which got cut off that stinks. Okay, well this is the first year, second year, third year so just this is early and this is later. And the orange all the orange bars are control. Okay, so there's no topsoil no seed. Then you have this little lump that's supposed to look like topsoil. And then you have these little seeds of seeds. Okay. And in the first year, after we deployed our experiment. So over here, what we find is that what I would have thought that when you put seed down you get more plants. Okay. Before this experiment, if you ever asked me, like, does passive restoration or does restoration without the inclusion of seed or plants work I would have been like, almost never know. Okay, almost never does passive restoration area land systems work. And look at that. Our first year that data goes with what I said, I know everything. Unfortunately, we decided to follow us for more than one year. And what we found afterwards is that there was no significant difference in either plant species richness or vegetation cover any year after the first year. So the green and purple bars that are showing just the topsoil topsoil seeded. There was no difference. Okay. So essentially what I had always thought what I had always recommended to people always was that if you want successful restoration, you need to add seed was totally blown apart by this study. Look, Alexander Pope is very disappointed me. Okay, I made this assumption about what works because in like, I've been working in restoration for like 15 years but that only means I've worked on what like what like 30 projects, which is a lot, but it's not all of them. So I had made this assumption and that assumption pushed my recommendations to people. So I was making recommendations to people that they buy very expensive but we love native seed I want to insult any native seed people here but like very expensive native seed and put it down I always made this assumption because I was under the assumption that you had to do that well that is clearly not true. I would still say in lots of situations you want to add seed or you want to put in plants. But clearly that's not always the case right. I was wrong people I admit it. I've been running again. So in the desert, people like to install solar panels. Okay. So something like this often actually looks something close to this okay. And so before so solar panels get installed, they scour all the vegetation and then they put up the panels. And there's this weird dynamic in the Southwest about like revegetation, revegetating under solar panels. One, it's hard because it's just hard to like get in here to revegetate with machines and stuff. You don't have things growing you don't want the plants like touching the solar panels. And the other thing is that there's this widespread belief that in the desert. So we're talking about the Sonoran desert. You can't seed under these panels, because there couldn't possibly be native desert plants that are adapted to being in like the sun when it's like right here. So really, these plants can't grow under the shade. Right. I've never seen any studies on this, but this is the the general assessment and I was under this. This assumption as well. So then we did a test, and given this test is not out in the desert it's on a super contrived place but it's a test nonetheless. So we did on the roof of the building I work at which there is so this is kind of the roof. It's kind of weird but there's these big solar panels that have been installed on the roof and we're like, Oh, cool. A study system that I don't have to drive around to go get there so under in this whole area we seeded a bunch of native Sonoran desert plants plants that you might expect to be totally adapted and require the sun to be on them so that they could photosynthesize right. It is after we seeded we installed a bunch of plots. So these plots we installed I don't know why that says for that should say five, I made a mistake, another mistake. So we installed five plots that were under the solar panels, all the time. These plots were shaded 24 hours a day. Okay, we had five plots that were half shaded by the solar panel and half unshaded. And then we had five plots that were completely outside of the solar panel. Okay, this is kind of what it looked like. You can see so the solar panels were fairly continuous but they did have these little rays of light. And that's what the plants look like now I'm not going to show you a graph of the data I'm just going to show you a picture. And plants grow under solar panels like I think so. So this, these are all the native plants that we seeded plus like a couple of randos that I was like where did these things come from I don't know birds are dropping them in or whatever. But you can see that under the solar panels in almost continuous shade. Native Sonoran Desert plants were doing, not just fine, but really well, there was really high cover they were all flowering doing all the kinds of things and then out here in this wimpy land, things weren't doing so well. Again, I made this assumption based on just like kind of talking with people looking at people but I didn't see anything to suggest otherwise I was making an assumption that you just cannot do ecological restoration under the solar panels totally totally wrong. I think, again, it's not this silver bullet I think that there are situations where maybe restoration isn't warranted or it might be a little harder but this is suggesting that it can work. All right, not accommodating for uncomfortable truths let us continue along this pathway of my failures. Okay, so usually I'm working the Sonoran Desert usually looks like this super beautiful it's full of plants and up. And sometimes it looks like this so a border wall has been put up along the Mexico and us border and lots of regions. When you put up the border wall fence they have to take out a lot of the plant material so that they can move big machines to install the fence. So, lots of times you need to do restoration after barter wall installation to get back some of the, some of the plants and usually actually don't do restoration right here because you have to do this thing called the view shed. So people have to be able to see right next to the border wall but there's just lots of degradation that goes on with the installation of the border wall fences. So, one of my master students Amy Gill was interested in this and we were working in a park where an area of the border wall was installed, and about 4000 agave pulmarize were destroyed in the installation. So agave pulmarize a really important native plant in the Sonoran Desert, it's really, really important culturally for the native peoples there. It's important ecologically so there's this endangered long nose lesser bat I really should know I don't know I should remember the name but there's this bat that's endangered that relies on the flowers of the agave and it's economically important as well because you use it to make tequila. So it's a super important plant and they grow super, super slow. So she was interested in doing a restoration study and so actually you probably can't see it but this is a photo of the area where we did it you might be able to see the lines but anyway in this region right here we're about 4000 of these agaves were destroyed. So, we conducted a study in collaboration with some other groups to install agaves for restoration agaves are like notoriously difficult for like all the people in the region are like. But they're really important so we need to figure out how to get them in the ground. So, Amy was interested in looking at how to understand biotic and a bio factors important. So what are the things that might drive the success or failure of agave restoration. So, she planted out a bunch of these agaves are called pops they're usually about three to five years old. Okay, and then she had a bunch of treatment so she had shading we did not use umbrellas we use shade cloth. We had herb or exclusion out there the herb or is there are rabbits but have alinas like particularly like these what once agaves are really big like in this picture. Nothing wants to eat them they're badass but when they're like this they're like delicious and succulent and they have a bunch of liquid in them so have alinas like to rip them out of the ground. And then we had weed control. Okay, so the area in which we installed our experiment was overrun by this non native grass called layman's love grass. It's super noxious and it grows like continuous it sucks. And we took it out in two different ways okay we hand pulled and we use herbicide so those are two different treatments. Okay, oh, here we go hand pulled. These are the pictures I decided to use I don't know what I'm thinking okay hand pulled and herbicide to get rid of the weeds okay. So this is what the data looks like. So up here we have the number of live agaves. Down here we have the number of leaves. Okay, so that kind of tells you something about growth. And then all the bottom here you can see the different treatments so see if for control we had an agave we didn't do anything we excluded have alinas we exclude have alinas and we shaded did it did it did it. Okay, don't worry about what's going on the bottom, I will orient you. Okay. So what do you see. Well, it looks like over here you have the highest number of live agaves when you exclude have alinas or you do some kind of shading or for something like that. And that makes sense because we know that have alinas like to go in and munch the little baby ones and shading is really important because although agaves are a native Sonoran desert plant, the little baby ones need to be shaded a bit because the sun can actually like bake them and and kill them. Okay. Okay, that we know, and everyone's known, not a big deal. Here's the weird thing. Over here, we found that some of the lowest numbers of live agaves. So the greatest mortality the greatest debt was actually in places where we remove the weeds. I don't know about you guys, but what I was taught and how I operate is that weed management is a central component of successful ecological restoration, because if you got the weeds in there, they are going to take all the nutrients and the shape like the space and the sun and all the resources that those growing plants that you want there they're going to take them all. So they're going to out compete the natives. So weed management is a super central component of ecological restoration. However, this is showing that that is actually not the case at all. Again, our little agave is that we put in had the most debt when you got rid of the weeds. You guys don't like the Alexander Pope thing. I thought it was cute. Okay, whatever, I'll take it out from the next talk. Okay, so this is weird, right? Because essentially, before I get to that, essentially what this data was suggesting is that it's a waste, not only is it a waste of resources to remove the layman's lovegrass that not native from the site before you put in your plants, but it's bad. It is against or reducing your likelihood to be successful. And that is super uncomfortable for like a restoration person to be like, okay, maybe weeds aren't that bad. But you know what people have known this for a long time. So this is a paper that came out, I don't know, recently. And this is just showing the diversity or the number of flower visitors of native pollinators on different plants. Okay, so higher is better. And the orange is native plants and the blue are non native plants. Okay, so all this graph is showing you is that there are times where non native plants are providing pollinator services. Okay, pollinators are important. And maybe weeds aren't all that bad. So I'm not going to use this and start going out and telling people like weeds are great. I love weeds. No way. But what this did is totally change my approach and saying like weeds are bad and always take like 30% of your resources and allocate it to weed management blah, blah, blah, blah. That's not always the case. In some cases, particularly when you're dealing with agaves, you can take those resources that you were going to allocate to weed management, allocate them elsewhere. Maybe buy more agaves. I don't know buy yourself a nicer field truck. But the uncomfortable truth here is that this like thing in restoration that like weeds bad. I mean they are bad but in some cases they're not too bad or in some cases they help you achieve your goal. Like this really uncomfortable truth that I had to come into, you know, anyway, okay, and how have I messed up the last one overlooking simple for fancy. Oh, this is the worst. This is the greatest sin. Okay, um, so I live in Arizona, if you haven't already picked that up and I live over here in Tucson. And over here is Phoenix or capital. And there is a corridor called the I 10 quarter it's one of the only parts of I 10 that goes north to south, crazy. And it's the highway you take to get from Phoenix to Tucson or to not Tucson to Phoenix. It's also one of the most dangerous areas of highway in the United States. People die here all the time it's terrible. And the reason for that is that this is what the road looks like all the time so they put the road in this area. And that to either side of it for miles and miles and miles there's graded farmland ag land that's been left. Okay, there's nothing growing up there, nothing, nothing. So it's just like, it's just soil that likes to blow around and cause these to make it impossible for you to see what's in front of you. And for whatever reason people like to continue driving when they can't see what's in front of them but that's a whole nother story. So, you get these dust storms and, and, and it causes a lot of car accidents is terrible. Because of that there's tons of people associated with this road from researchers to Arizona Department of Transportation to farmers to all kinds of people who are interested in doing restoration to the, to the sides of the road so that they can get the soil in place so that it doesn't blow and then cause these accidents. Okay, and people have spent a lot of money, like an absurd amount of money, trying to restore these areas with like zero success, not like 2%, like zero success. So I come in with a group of people. And I'm like, I know what you guys need. You need some fancy stuff where we get like atmospheric physicists and soil physicists and all these different people to do like interdisciplinary work so that we can attack this problem from all sides. And they're like, you know what you're talking about. I was like, I know, I didn't. So we try this experiment where we're like, all right, we're going to put up some fences and we're going to have some plots. And I was like, you know what your problem is, because it's like impossible to get seed that you put seed down it like blows away in your face it slaps you on the way out it's terrible. So we're like, okay, the first problem is is that these soils. These are have been abandoned for like, I don't know, a really, really long time like the soils are like almost inert they're like super depleted of beneficial bacteria and fungi and like that are really important not only for the plant but for producing the stuff that like six the soil together. So we're like, we need to take like a soil perspective. Okay. And they're like, we never did that before and we're like, oh, this is so fancy. So what we decided to do is we bought a bunch of very, very expensive commercial inoculants. Okay. And then we bought all the stuff and we sprayed it and we like talk with my probability colleges and we put all this instrumentation out we're like this is totally going to work. I don't remember which plot was which but it didn't work one of these is the control one of them is the treatment and it was a total failure. We got nothing at all to grow out there, or did we is there stuff growing out there. You guys see something on the ground. Alexander Pope sees it stuff grew out there, not in our plots, but up against the fence. And I was like, huh, that's funny. I shouldn't have said that, you know why because I've been doing work for years on this very thing. I do work on above ground structures for arid land systems because we know that an airline systems, particularly in the desert. Hey, when you get monsoons. I don't know if you guys have ever experienced monsoon, but it's literally like a wall of water you can get like an inch of water in like 30 minutes it is insane they're beautiful. But when you get this wall of water the water moves and it picks up everything with it. So you get this thing it's called sheet flow movement of water. Okay, so the water moves across the landscape it's picking up seed it's picking up organic it's picking up all this delicious stuff. And it just moves it wherever it wants, unless it hits something. If it hits something it drops it. Okay, and so I've been doing a lot of work on this like super old school I mean people have been doing this for like 4000 years of putting out these rock lunas or these brush piles. And essentially all you do is you put this above ground stuff down the ground and then you just wait and after monsoon, what starts happening is if the water comes in this direction and it hits this. You drop all that delicious organic material and seeds and then you're going to start getting stuff growing here, and it works. And I've done this for years. Why did it not occur to me to try this in that other site. This is another thing I work on I work on these things called con mods okay they're con modifier I don't remember what con is for con. And essentially they're just these super easy little metal X's and you put them out on the landscape and they're supposed to serve the same purpose you put it on a landscape so that when water moves through the landscape or even wind. And it's moving organic material and seed. Okay, it gets trapped there and then you have these nice little nurseries of lots of seed. There's a little bit of shading which of course is always good so it reduces soil temperatures at the surface and increases just slightly soil temperature. Okay, and so you get nicer areas for seeds to germinate and then once they're growing, you have all that organic material that got trapped there so that they have all these nutrients to access to grow faster. I do this work all the time. Okay, this simple work, all the time. It did not occur to me to try any of this stuff at our site. Why because we were trying to be fancy man and it didn't work it like was just absurdly. It didn't work. That's all I have to say. So, you know, now we're trying all this other stuff where we're trying to put in another. Okay, we're trying to put in fences and con mods but I overlooked simple and simple like this whole field of stuff that I work in constantly that I know that works that is less expensive, and it's easier to do. I overlooked it because I was blinded by like fancy microbial stuff that we can buy online and then dig a pit and put a sensor down and, you know, and the point of this is not to like, you know, say that fancy stuff doesn't work because I'm sure there are times it does whatever. The point is, is that I was blinded by the fancy so I ignored my knowledge and I got blinded by something else and it turned out pretty badly because nothing worked. And so I think it's just important for us to remember particularly for things you know a lot of the that rock work I was doing it stuff that we know that people have been doing for 4000 years you know people have been doing for 4000 years probably works I don't know, but I overlooked the simple for fancy and it was to my detriment. Okay. Okay, that's that's actually all I have so if you take anything from this talk. Again, I hope it's not that I'm terrible at my job because I'm kind of okay at it, but the point is that I make mistakes all the time and all these mistakes were totally preventable. If I wasn't blinded by fancy things, or if I was a little more open minded about things that would work. Okay, or if I did more tests, or if I talked to other people, but I didn't I made that mistake. So I won't make the mistake again. Right. And hopefully you guys won't make those mistakes because you just heard me talk about them, and that is why we need to become a little more open as a field in talking about things that didn't work. Okay, none of us are perfect and also restoration and reclamation is extremely hard. We're never going to get it 100% all the time, ever. Okay, so it doesn't mean anything bad about us or about our abilities. It just means that you had to learn something else and if you share with other people you're more likely to get that knowledge that you can make it better for the next time. Okay. That's all I got. Thank you. Are there any questions. Oh, before I go on I just want to prep you all. I'm going to be here tomorrow morning. And guess what's going to happen. We're all going to share. Okay, I'm going to stand here uncomfortably if I have to. And I'm going to ask people to share their own stories. Okay, and you could share it about your friends Steve if you if you want but be ready, because that's what's happening tomorrow morning. Okay, anybody have any questions. Yes. The question was how long were was the scraped five set five inches of topsoil held before they re put it on it was about a year. Yeah, love pimples love me some pimples. Yes, so the one thing that has stayed consistent throughout everything I've ever done is that the more heterogeneity you have the better now I am also coming from a place that very often I'm working in the super degree landscapes where getting anything to grow is like seen as a win even if it's a non native, because you just need stuff holding on to the soil first. Obviously that's not the goal the ultimate goal is something else so you know we've worked with divots. Have you heard of ramps. So there's this thing run by the USGS it's called ramps. The R stands for restoration. Yes, I don't remember what the rest of it stands for but it's USGS ramps if you put that into Google you'll get to it. Anyway, the point of it is we have this coordinated. And this has to do with the question I promise we have this coordinated set of studies I think there's 27 now they're all over the Southwest and it's exact same very very large scale experiment. We're testing the same stuff and we want to see what opera and it's across already gradients, we want to see what works across all sites and etc etc. We're checking so we're checking the con mods we're checking all kinds of things we're checking divots and divots always always works because particularly in the area Southwest when you have any sort of divot in the ground that's where not only water will collect so it's it's So moisture maintains higher for longer periods of time but you also get the collection of the organic material and the seeds and usually even if it's a really small to be you get slight shading, which also increases soil moisture. So adding heterogeneity on onto a landscape, I think is a really, really good way to go. Anyone else. Yes. So go back to the question there were there any responses. I got probably like three and I sent out 500. So I probably got back emails of people that are like this is great I don't want to do it probably like 50 of those emails, and then the rest of people are like, Elise Gorn is not interested to lead. Yeah, that's a great question so in. There's a lot of organizations that are doing this thing so like the US Fish and Wildlife for example. I don't know if it's in the south or just the Southwest but they have this thing called CCAST, which is. It sounds for either but it's it's US Fish and Wildlife CCAST and it's a, what they do is that they find people have done restoration reclamation, they interview them and then they get like a little blog about it and it's all this information of like what were your goals tell me about the site what worked what didn't blah blah blah and then you could go on to a map, and it's all kinds of stuff it's riparian it's, I don't know if they have much reclamation but it's. And it's exactly that and so, and I've known about efforts like that in they had one like Orange County California and there was one in like the Northeast so there's people doing it here and there, but I don't know anyone that's doing like a nationwide folks it's it's pretty expensive students to like do to like find people and then interview them so it's like who was the money to do I mean US Fish and Wildlife I guess but there's no grants to do this kind of thing most of Eco Restore I like created based on like the you know last bits of money from other grants. It's like a really hard thing to fund but it's super important right. Is there someone back there. No. Yes. I love weird questions. It's not a weird question that's a brilliant question and yes so the question was, you know this whole thing with the, the, the solar panels obviously the plants were doing really well. Very likely because the soil surface, the temperatures were lower and the soil moisture was able to maintain. There is a whole like field of research it's called agrovoltaics, and it is growing food under solar panels, and it works and the in the three times the production under solar panel, the exact same inputs. And there's some people in Flagstaff they're doing so they're growing biocrusts under those things and then they're putting that back out. So biocrusts are really important for holding on to the soil and for inoculating the soil. So brilliant and people are doing it and if you're into it, there's people doing it. Yeah. Yes. Oh yeah, I probably should have mentioned that. The question is that weird study where we removed the weeds and the agave did so poorly. What happened. That was an excellent question. So two things. When you don't have the weeds, the guy they are much easier to find by the hovelina. So there was way more hovelina damage and without the wheat so the, the, the weeds were something called layman's love grass really tall grass, and the agaves are really small so we were actually acting as shade from the sun. So we were noticing way more herbivory on the areas where we took the weeds and way more like sun damage. So it's like, you can measure sun damage on these things. You know, we didn't measure that that's a great. That's certainly a possibility we didn't measure that. So maybe it is. Yeah, absolutely not. So the question was about anecdotal evidence and how do you. So, so people on the field know way more about what's going on than almost anyone else. Right. But how for those people in the field, whether it's people are paid to be out there or people who work out there or people who recreate out there or camp out there whatever. How do you get those people to record the information is huge cashier information they have so that we can leverage it to build better restoration and I don't know the answer to that. So the way I do it personally as cooperative extension because it's the best job in the world. I actually am like the bridge between research and application and so I talked to a lot of the people who have the anecdotal evidence and then I facilitate events where people can share these kinds of things or I collect data and surveys or do this kind of thing and then I share that with some of the restoration researchers. But beyond that I'm not exactly sure I mean I think events like this where people are talking and sharing are really important. I don't I don't know I mean most of the folks I work with that are non researchers I'm always like write me a blog post like let's get this information out here and the people understand we are like I do not have time for that, or I'm not going to pay for it and I'm like I get it. It's a hard enough to crack. I think also there's a there's a need to get people in academia who often are doing some of the formal testing these kinds of things to understand the value of people on the ground because academia is like, oh I'm just going to like test the restoration thing and I don't actually care like what happens afterwards because they're not trained to care and they're not rewarded to care. So also getting them because when you when you get the people who are conducting the research or that some of the formal research anyway, and ostensibly getting out to the masses, even though they don't. If you get them to care, then they will start doing things like showing up to more management relevant meetings or actually going out and talking to some people in the field, they can get more of that like two way flow of information. Anything else. Yes. So the question is do I think it's changing this this getting academic research kind of more relevant, I guess the field and I would also agree that it's getting better and I think part of it is that a lot of academic grants now, like force you to be interdisciplinary and force you to have something called like a broader impact like what is the value of this outside of your lab. And so people are like, oh, like this has to matter outside of my life, I shouldn't make fun of these people but I'm one of them so I can put. I'm in academia, but so people are like oh like I have to think about like how the I'm not going to just do an experiment write it up into a journal that nobody reads and then then I'm done it's like maybe I should attend a manager meeting and present my work maybe I should write a blog post for a special issue, a special interest magazine maybe this and this and this and so I think it's almost being forced on through the granting agencies I mean even like NSF who they don't actually care about anything applied or that's my opinion, they have these these things in there where you have to write the broader impacts or the, the like utility on the ground. And so it's forcing people to think about it. Any other questions. I hope you all spend the rest of your evening thinking about the failures of your friends Steve, so that you can come back tomorrow morning, because I'm going to ask you and if nobody says anything I'm just going to stand up here and stare, and it's going to be super awkward for everyone involved. Okay. Thank you very much.