 You know, I'm a big proponent of observing and I think that's a talent that's in a skill that we don't work on or we don't teach it or we don't, you know, put high value on it. So I think this talk is also part of observing and making sure that when you do a psych characterization, not only are you doing things like measuring and doing all the things the regulators want you to do but it's also about observing and seeing what you have, where you want to go and maybe some things around you or people around you that can teach you something. So I think reclamation and restoration is something that has evolved over decades and it's still evolving and I agree that we can all learn from each other. Although I got to tell you if we're going to have that kind of conversation that I think Elise wanted, maybe we need to do it at night over beer and wine instead of coffee and orange juice. All right, so my mode of operation and presentations is usually to pack a lot into a PowerPoint. So if you miss something, it's going to be recorded and so don't worry about it, it will be available. So I'm going to try to go through this so that we leave some time for questions at the end and so with that we'll get going if I know how to do this forward thing. Okay, so I was given the task of talking about psych characterization and my first thought about that was that you really need to think in terms of is it remediation or is it reclamation and restoration because in remediation psych characterization has a very definite definition and they may have different steps but they have similar steps with different purposes. So this is something we've all seen in the news lately. I would not want to characterize that site but that's what happens with remediation sites. We need to I think in terms of is it an old site? Is it a new site? Time becomes an immediate issue. Containment is important and the thing I think of in most securities all the brain cells would be remediation. So there's a reclamation aspect to it but there's also a remediation aspect. So reclamation and restoration has a different perspective than remediation. It's similar steps but I'm going to talk about news sites where time is generally more available and since planning is paramount. So I think how lessons learned is a good place to walk away with today's simulation topic. Planning is a key word in my talk. So a little bit of planning goes a long way. You can never start to worry. So some of the disturbances we think about you know are ones that we've been here historically for, oil and gas, mining both underground and surface, pipeline, another pipeline issue, transmission lines, municipal projects have a reclamation and restoration aspect. And I put in this housing development because sometimes we don't think of how extensive housing divisions, subdivisions are on the last group. First kind of thing is where we live and work but it takes up space and it has a disturbance aspect. So in my world I'll probably talk more about site searcher's basin as a baseline assessment or pre-accessing. We'll hear pre-accessing more. It needs to be more proactive than reactive. I think sometimes when growing gold, you know the commodity and great prices, you forget about the pre-planning part and you become more reactive. So again, pre-planning is something you can do with that. So the type of data you need is going to vary by your, it could be by a landowner if you're talking about the agricultural land. The more often than not it's by state or federal regulations, there will be some local regulations coming into play too. And then again, we'll talk in native or advocacy. So when you do a pre-assessment, I think about, as I said, a rooftop cycle. When you have over on one side of the arrow, we have an area that you're going to disturb and we could be an oil and gas pad. It could be a road. These are just how many acres they're disturbed, just based on roads. Time to get into a little bit of things, pipelines out, so those linear disturbances can add up to a lot of issues. But it's just a big puzzle. I don't even know the size of it. And it depends on where you're at. So if you're at an active copper mine in Arizona, active coal mine in Indonesia and the oil and gas pad in North Dakota, you have any knowledge of all of those areas. You kind of have a pretty good idea of what your challenges are going to be, even going into that. But you need to understand those pieces of the puzzle. So we're going to take a little bit of a test here. That's five seconds to look at that. Ten, one, two, three, four, five. What color was the full side of the Rubik's cube that was exposed? Oh, look at that. Oh, sorry. I don't want to do that. Burn. You're through me. How many items were there? Maybe that's part of it. Eight. Is that true? Eight or nine? Let's count. I guess it begins, right? One, two, three. Nine. Nine if you don't count the price tag. Okay. So what was the dollar on the price tag? And then how many handles did the top have? One. Okay. So that's probably a good guess, right? Even if you didn't see that it only had one, you know, almost that's just one handle. Okay. So there you go. That was a very simplified picture, right? If you would have, let's think that by 10 times the number of items in there, it would have been a little more difficult. So most of us don't have a photographic memory over time. As I get older, I know that all the more are painfully. So we need to quantify what you see, what you have, before you disturb it. And one of the reasons why you do that is it's going to be tied to ongoing monitoring after reclamation. So a good definition I came up with was it's an initial set of critical observations or data with which to compare future observations or results or as a control. So somehow you need to quantify what you have before you disturb it. And part of that is to pull it into your reclamation point. It helps to do statements, it helps to identify leads that may be present, have a lead plan, do you have any sense of experience that you need to worry about from a federal level or a state level, and then establish that evolutionary so you know how to compare your success later. Yeah. So some of the resources to consider, these are just part of the list. There's probably more than what I've listed here. So we'll go through those that I've said here. So surface use, land ownership is a big deal. It is where I live. We're, you know, half the surface, it might be several grounds. So what's there to begin with? The ownership, all those things I've listed under, wells, roads, blah, blah, blah. You need to make sure you understand what's in the general vicinity and where you're going to be disturbing. And in our case, it's probably here, too, or it's a big issue. So in terms of wildlife habitat, some of the existing refrigerators we already have before you even start to need it. Fair quality, you only got to know what to have, not only from, you know, gathering baseline information. So when you set a mission standard, you're going to, those are pretty much two steps that you can negotiate or talk with something already achieved on a mission standard that you are going to be under. People are a lot smarter than me. You can talk about your own wall. So I listed in here a clean water act. The other one is clean air act. Clean water act is on surface and brown water. So the percentage of climate use, that means you're going to need to achieve the requirements that the federal yards have for both of those acts. And then in terms of water quality, the DNRC surface can't get here. So surface water might be seen as clean, plus the flow rate, you know, what's the channel geography or geometry, surface water class of the creation, all of those things need to be extremely ahead of us. These are some of the things that you might look at in terms of measuring ahead of time. Again, you're going to be under certain standards. You want to know what the baseline's are because some of those parameters, you may already be at the limit that a standard may be because of this natural background. Brown water, same kind of thing. What's depth, brown water, what's the quality of the ground water? What's the classification of the ground water? It's a geology. And then if you're going to be injecting anything, you have a capacity of any kind of geologic formation. So geology and ground water, I kind of get together. So it's some of the analyte, and I think in terms of ground water, again, it's not an absolute risk. There's probably more. You need to understand if it's state-less farming, wherever you live. And then ground water monitoring, these two things are similar. So this is just a kind of a look down at view and then cross-view of geology and ground water that we have in this case. So from a soil standpoint, I think, not by us. My background is soils and beds. So I think what's underground is going to displace that you get above ground. So you need to understand the soil in terms of erosion capacity or feasibility as well as decimation feasibility. And we all know that over the course of a landscape, not all soils are equal. And between states, between regions, we just heard from the latest in Arizona. I can guarantee those soils are going to look different there than they do here in very hot holes, essentially, in Malta. So this is my big thing. I think sometimes we get all mixed up in our terminology of what topsoil is. I mean, basically, people put a lot of words in places under there, but we all kind of know the concept. But sometimes I get stuck on actual words because some taxonomic point of view, topsoil has a very defined definition. So what kind of assessments and pre-assessors do you need? It's going to depend on what industry you're in. It's going to depend on the size, and it's going to depend on if you're a native or a problem. So some of the basic steps for soil work to be together, all the key existing information you have, don't reinvent the wheel. Map your soils into map units. You can use a disting map like the NRCS would have, but you need to understand the limitations of those maps that are on order three level. You sample your map units, gather field information, send things to the lab if you have budget and money and time, and then how do you interpret those results for your actual use. So mapping, again, don't reinvent the wheel. Make sure you know what's available. You might have other soil surveys, not only just NRCS, but you may have other soil surveys. Other companies have done work in that area, and I never poo-poo anything that's old. Because those old surveys have a lot of information. We talked a lot about anecdotal stuff. There may be things you can learn from old surveys. There's things you can learn from people that have done the work in that area before. So on the NRCS map, make sure you gather representative soil samples. Either agriculture is going to be a little bit different. This is a native piece of ground here. You have to sample enough samples in those native areas to get a representative characterization of that quality. And then you can compile your own draft soil map based on all those things that you've already done. Aerophotography is a great thing to use. Google Earth is a great thing to use if you need to look at history of a particular area. Go back in that upper, I think it's the upper left. Look at what's happened in that area over time. The history, again, is going to tell you maybe what you have to deal with. Let's see. I'm a firm believer of doing your own soil cores, your own soil care, your own shovel work. If you're in the mountains or any steep country like in the Badlands, road cuts or erosional features can give you a lot of information as to what your soils are. So you don't have to dig a hole. Don't do it. But if there's nothing else, there's something that you can get specific information. So the number of samples are going to vary based on whether it's native or agriculture, the size, the linear width of your right-of-ways. So if anybody asks, I almost just said somebody will say, well, how many samples did I take? And I'll sound like a lawyer, and I'm going to say it all depends. But those are some of the factors you need to understand. What's your purpose? What's the size? What regulatory limits are you under? And then what's the variability in the landscape? So then these are a list of criteria that we use. This is the state suitability criteria in Wyoming for soil, topsoil or topsoil substitutes, and you'll see it's divided into suitable, marginal, or unsuitable. I think it's interesting, as a side note, you'll notice texture has no unsuitable limits. But we all know what clay is like to see them through. But yet it's pretty much only listed in the marginal column. So compositing might be something we do on an ag field. You can do it by depth and then locations. But I would still try to get an idea of what your soil map units are within that field, and then try to maybe do your compositing within those soil map units. Again, if you've got the time and you've got the money, I would try to do it by map units. So in an undisturbed area, and especially in, and this would be like a native rangeland, if you can do it by horizon or similar horizons, you know, you can't sample every horizon because you don't have enough material to go to the lab. But you can compile horizons as best as you can. Believe it or not, that picture does have topsoil in it. It's going to look too great, so it's not tomato garden ground. And then where access is limited, you may have to do it by hand. You can do it by mechanical order. Try to take as many notes in the field as you can in terms of, and your NRCS, your local guys can really help you on this. But I really feel like take as much information as you can. Half the time spent is getting out to a location. So when you're out there, make as many notes as you can. You don't want to have to go back. And then make sure you put your sample locations down, document where those are at. You may have to go back. If you're going to compile it, you may not want to do the exact same location. But you're going to try to keep track of where those locations are. Profiles, this would be if you have a pit, you can kind of see where your horizons are, where your limiting plants' horizons are. That's really what you're trying to do. You're trying to determine capital salvage depth. Not everything is six inches. I know on pipelines a lot of times, everything is like six inches and go with it. But it may be three. It could be 18. You don't know that until you do those, either a kill effect or do your own poll. And these are some things you might want to write down in the field, in the sense that when you ask those locations, these things will give you a better idea of what your salvage depth is. These are some parameters you might analyze for. Make sure you understand if you're an industry person. Make sure you understand what the state is requiring you to analyze for. If it's an ag situation, a lot of the labs will have packages that they'll have a steeper package based on ag fragility or some type of industrial feasibility. And then the bottom line is you want to know how much you should take. You don't want to take too much. You don't want to leave anything there that's going to get basically driven on, impacted, ruined from a chemical or a physical standpoint. So ultimately, you're trying to come up with some salvage depth and know how many yards of suitable material you have. So on the vegetation side, it's very similar. You want to know what those communities are before you to serve an area. Establish a reference area so that you can compare after reclamation in terms of various parameters. But you need to know what's there and maybe an adjacent area that you could use as a reference for comparison area. Those are some parameters you might want to measure in terms of education, cover production, how much pounds per acre you have, density, diversity, those type of things. Not everybody's going to have to do all of these. This is pretty much industry driven or perfect driven. The basic precinct is a big thing, too. Well, you want to know what you have there before you start disturbing, because you want to know what the problems are going to be after it. And weeds can definitely be an issue. Let's get over that. So representatives, what needs to be monitored? I think I put this in here to know it's not necessarily characterization, but you should monitor everything that you've seen and then compare it back to that area that you established as a reference area. So you can have something to compare. Is it coming along? Is it trending? Am I getting the production I need? Am I getting the cover I need? If you don't do that, it goes back to that puzzle, that you have to rely on your own memory. And we just can't do that from a quantitative standpoint. So from an ag standpoint, you might look at a little field average, look at the historical yield, identify those productive and less productive areas. Again, that probably goes back to soil type. And have a pretty good idea what your ag fields look like. And then on linear disturbances, it's really problematic because it goes over a full landscape and has a lot of different soil types. So no areas afterwards that you might see some compaction problems, as well as subsidence problems. So one of the simplest things you can do is to photograph an area, go back to the same spot. If you have a recreation of gray GPS, that's better than anything or not anything, but it's better than nothing. Go back to that same spot and just do a north, south, east, west photograph at that spot. If you do monitor over different years, so go back in the same general timeframe. Like if you always monitor the end of June, go back in that same general timeframe, don't go back like in June and then go back to the end of August, especially if you're on native range because the grasses are all seared out and it won't be the same comparison. And then I've listed some things that you can compare quantitatively. So diversity, the only, the point I want to highlight there is that when you measure diversity, that's really by establishing a wildlife habitat, that's going to be a real important thing in terms of that land use. Wetlands, you guys have, you have the market on wetlands up here. So you have lots of them. You have your groundwater closer to the surface, depending on where you're at in the state. But these are some things that four of the engineers has achieved, defined the delineation program. You can look at national wetland inventory map, color in for red photography as in CIR. And that gives a really good idea of photographs that would take them like the end of August, September. And anything green shows up red, so you can really see those late season wetlands. Other pre-assessment ones, like I said before, aerial imagery will do as you say in my mind. It's been around forever. Some of the best use of photography I used to evaluate long-term issues was 1939 Black and White. It was like an NRCS office, somehow, USDA. And I didn't even think they had, imagine like Snoopy and the Red Baron, you know, where he was like leaning out the window with a brownie camera or something. But it really told the picture, even though it wasn't rectified at all from any kind of space on the ground. So a lot of things from aerial imagery, your databases are huge things. The power of the query, if you've ever heard that word, that is an important thing with RTIF. You can query anything. Our brains again aren't able to do as efficient of a job as putting in. Anybody know what query means? Everybody all familiar with that? Well, yeah. You know, like, well, I'm not even going to give you an example, but the query, it's really the power of the query for RTIF. So investigate that as a possibility. North Dakota has lots and lots of resources from both a pre-assessment and a post-assessment standpoint. I've listed some there. Sorry, I didn't have time to put in the links to these, but you can do the landing of those and get those publications. So in summary, be observant. I'm going to add that one after the leases talk, because a lot of this is just being observant, knowing what you need to do and how to document these areas before you disturb them. Because that's important. You need to know what you got well ahead of when you disturb an area. Improactive. That it again, a little bit of planning goes a long way. Understand the dynamics of the biological system in which you're working. There is not a one size fits all. And unfortunately, regulations tend to force us all into those pigeonholes in your homework and talk to others, because there's a lot of information out there, anecdotal as well as research, as well as white papers. There's a lot of information out there, and the idea is to find those people who have maybe been there before. So this is something I've always seen many, many times, that no one regrets having too much pre-assessment data, but they often regret not having them. Like boy, I wish I would have done this. Boy, I wish I would have gathered and so on. So because in the end, pre-assessment is going to maximize your chance of success. We go back to the whole puzzle thing, you know, where everything was kind of jumbled up. These are the things in my mind that make recommendations successful. And you're not going to be able to do that unless you know what you have before you start. And with that, I'll take any questions.