 Go ahead, Susan. Hi, everyone. Welcome to this webinar on live plants and emergency planning. I mean, it quickly goes through a few slides here. The best way to keep in touch with what we are doing at Connecting to Collections Care is to join the CCCC announce list. This is the email address so that you can, or the web address so that you can join it. You can like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. And also, everything is announced on our website. And if you have questions about caring for your collections, you can join the Connecting to Collections Care community. And the instructions for doing that are at this website, on our website, excuse me, under discussions. And if you were an old member of Connecting to Collections or Connecting to Collections Care, our discussions have changed, have moved to a new platform. And we can't just move everyone, so you need to join there. And if you have questions, you can always contact me. This is my email address. And this month we have the beginning of another course, Planning Your Reorg Project, which we're doing with CCI in Canada and UNESCO. Reorg is a fabulous storage planning program. This is the first time anything like this has been offered in the U.S. So it's a real opportunity. And then our next pre-webinar is going to be Exploring Alone. And that will be on April 16th. And that should be posted pretty quickly. It's not up quite yet. And without further ado, I'm going to turn this over to Jackie Salas. Hello, everybody. Thank you very much for coming in, tuning in today to discuss Planning for Natural Disasters with Botanical Collections. So I know this is a little atypical for the group. I would like to thank Foundation for Advancement and Conservation and Connecting to Collections Care for thinking about Botanical Collections and inviting me to speak. So welcome, everybody, from around the country it looks like. I am in sunny Oakland, California. I grew up in the East Bay here in California, near San Francisco. And I am definitely in earthquake territory. So that's lifelong drills for earthquakes or something that I have in my DNA at this point. And so when I was going through my education, I was interested in plants. I got my undergraduate degree from UC Davis in environmental horticulture and urban forestry. I learned about plants. And when I was working in conservatories and Arboretta doing internships, I was asking collections and managers and curators about emergency plans, since it's something that I had grown up being involved with. And it turned out that there actually wasn't too much information anecdotally that I could get from these curators about what important plants were in their collections, how they were actually being protected from things like floods and potential fires that may have occurred in the past and could potentially occur in the future. So it was just something that I have been interested in in my studies. I ended up getting accepted to the Longwood Graduate Program where I decided to study disaster planning for my thesis. And I see Chad just joined. Hi, Chad. I actually spoke with him during my thesis studies. So this research that I'm going to share with you today about planning for botanical collections, potential mitigation strategies for disaster damage, all of this information was obtained through my disaster planning studies through the University of Delaware and the Longwood Graduate Program. After I graduated in 2009, I got a job at Children's Berryland in downtown Oakland. And I had worked in a private estate and with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy a little bit before that. And I landed at Children's Berryland, which is a perfect melding of working with plants and people. So it's something I do. I get to share my joy for plants and people in Children's Berryland. I did continue to be interested in risk assessments and planning for potential disasters in terms of tree risk assessment. So our biggest plant collection that's most valuable at Children's Berryland is our oak trees. We have about 45 coast live oak trees that we manage. And those trees are the backbone of our landscape. And so that got me interested in learning more about how to care for them. And so I obtained my arborist license through the International Society of Arboriculture. And I got my risk assessment through the same organization as well so that I could learn how to best manage my canopy. Here we go. Again, a little slide to say that I'm currently employed at Children's Berryland in downtown Oakland, where my main areas of focus are grounds maintenance, habitat stewardship, and kids' education. So I can get those kids interested, our next round of curators and plant collectors out there. And in order to keep that environment happy, I do have to manage the landscapes and deal with some disasters. These are mostly biological and man-made disasters at Children's Berryland. So the man-made, you can see ruts from a food truck that accidentally thought that he could make it from one gate to another and slip down our pasture and made ruts all through our lawn. So there's human air involved with that that can be avoided. But biological issues that come up are our actual natural disasters that I deal with most at Children's Berryland. We have a phytocera. We have root rot in our soils that are common. And you combine traffic of 200,000 visitors walking across root systems and compaction of the soil, heavy clays that don't allow for much aeration, and we get some biological issues going on. So I have had to deal a little bit with some disasters at Fairyland, but knock on wood, I have not had to deal with anything intense. So we move on to the next slide. Why are we here today? Why are we talking about disaster planning and botanical collections? Well, when you go to a garden, you go to a garden for the plants. The plants aren't there. Well, that's the point. So we really need to make sure in a botanical setting that our plant collections are maintained and preserved in situations where there could be potential damage. So in this picture, you'll see Fair Trial Tropical Botanic Garden. There is a picture of Hurricane Andrew damage on the left. The area is supposed to look like the picture on the right. So this picture on the right is taken from the top of the bridge that you see in the background of the picture on the left. So you can see the incredible amount of damage that can happen to a botanical institution during a natural disaster. Again, this is a hurricane. This is Longview House and Garden down in New Orleans. This is damage that the garden obtained after Hurricane Katrina. So on the right, you can see damage that happened to the canopy of trees. You shouldn't be able to see that much sky through the canopy. The canopy should be nice and dense. And unfortunately, the hurricane came through and had ripped off a majority of the leaves in that canopy, which opens up the gardens underneath to much more sun than they're used to, and does damage the trees. On the right-hand side, you'll see damage to flooding, from flooding. So soil is picked up during floods and moved into different locations in the garden where there's not usually soil. So you can see heavy mounding of soil in atypical places and debris that's moved in with the soil. So you can see some examples of damage here. So disaster planning is important to botanical institutions because they are a way to keep your institution going after it incurs a problem. So we need to safeguard our institutions and keep them going for the community. So I'll discuss a little bit later in some case studies. I worked with Brookside Gardens outside of Washington, D.C. and even if you don't have any specific plants that are in your collection that are extremely valuable. So I know I'm talking to a community that may not have botanical collections in the forefront of their collections. We may be talking to historic sites with one or two valuable trees or plant specimens that belong to the owner originally. We may be talking to small museums here in this audience that could have some herbarium specimens that may be important but no actual living collections. So I do want to talk in general about disaster planning for everyone, but specifically for botanical collections, it's very important to us to safeguard our collections again because without the plants, nobody's going to come to the garden. So disaster planning is also a component of accreditation. So in American Association of Museums and the American Public Gardens Association, in order to actually be accredited, it's been over 10 years that the American Association of Museums has required disaster preparedness. But I can say just recently that the American Public Gardens Association just this year in 2019 has included disaster preparedness planning as a requirement to become accredited with their network. So you may and want to do a disaster plan to keep your garden or plant collection safe, but you may also have to do a plan in order for accreditation. So either way, if you want to or if you have to, this talk will be able to give you some insight, be able to put a simple plan together that will help to safeguard your collection. So you're going to see this slide a few times. This is just to keep us, but mainly me, on track. So this is going to be the topics that will be covered during this discussion today. Does anybody have any quick questions that they want to post in the general chat before we kind of get into the meat and potatoes of the talk? Feel free and go ahead and list any initial questions in the side. And then there will be some opportunity for questions at the end also. So I'd like to keep specific questions for the end. There was also going to be four quizzes presented throughout the discussion. And the quizzes will be topical to what we're talking about during this discussion. We'll go over those answers as they are relayed from the participants. And so we'll just go right ahead. Finding general resources for disaster planning is the first item that we will discuss. And it's easy. It is a basic slide that is going to talk about different websites you can go to, different organizations, and different websites that you can go to that have general planning resources available. So these are not botanically specific. These are cultural institutions. These are organizations that help cultural institutions with general planning. So you will find links to all of these websites in the handouts below. If you have not had a chance to download the handouts, now would be a great time for everybody to download those handouts and look at the information contained. So not only will you find the websites with links for the general and botanical planning resources that are available that I'll be discussing, but you'll also find a natural disaster planning template. So we're actually going to go over that natural disaster planning template that I created during my thesis research. And if that would be a wonderful template to be able to write notes directly onto while I'm doing this discussion. So feel free again to download those handouts and print them out for your talk. So obviously you're here. So you know about the Foundation for Advancement and Conservation. There's some great information that you can find on their website. The Heritage Emergency National Task Force is a network of cultural institutions that work together to provide emergency planning and support for one another. Again, the American Association of Museums requires disaster planning documents for accreditation within their organization so you can find information and assistance through them. The Getty Institute has some valuable worksheets that you can work through. Dplan.org is an interesting website that you can go to that actually you can input information into the website and it will print you out a mock-up plan right then and there. So depending on your collection, you may be able to use that as a nice resource for a simple plan for yourself. And the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training is a federal government resource that has some information on how to deal with cultural institutional planning for disaster mitigation. So we're going to dive right into the surveys, case studies, and interviews that I made during my thesis research. So this is the real meat and potatoes of the talk where we are going to discuss botanical information that I obtained through my studies. We're going to start off with some surveys in a second. This is just an example of all the research that I did. It's basically my qualifications, so you know that I spent two years of my life delving into this topic and I have the authority to be discussing it with you here today. So we don't need to dwell on that. Go back and look if you're interested in exactly what I did for the thesis topic and you can actually download the website. I'll show you where to download the actual thesis later on. So here is the first quiz that I was talking about. This is a question about how many institutions are here. We want to see how many are here and how many actually have a disaster plan. So this will help guide the talk. So let's see. So zooming in, it looks like this is great. Many of you have a general emergency or disaster plan at your organization. And for those of you that don't, this is exactly why you're here. So we will help you to get the resources you need to get one later on. So let me see here if I try to move the slide forward at the quiz stage. Yes, it does. So this is a slide that I took in 2008. The survey shows that 50% of public gardens that were surveyed actually had a natural disaster plan in place. So you can see here that I asked the American Public Gardens Association members to participate in the survey about natural disaster damage. And during that survey, this was one of the questions that was asked. They responded saying that 50% did have a natural disaster plan and 49% did not. So let's see what this group that's here today actually says in terms. And we have the results of the quiz back up on the screen. Let's see. So we are way ahead of the game in terms of disaster planning compared to the Public Gardens Association. Sorry, Public Gardens Association. It went back in 2000 and the survey was taken in 2007 or publishing in 2008. So that's incredibly wonderful news to know that this group that we're talking to does actually have a plan. So we're already ahead of the game. That's 15%. Again, you're here for a reason and we'll get you set up with the resources you need to create a plan. So on to the next question. We have our second quiz question that we would like to know. Of the organizations that do have a disaster plan, how many actually have your collections represented in terms of mitigation in that plan? So are your collections protected through the plan or is it just a general plan? Mike, is it possible to see the actual number of participants? Is it just the nine and the six that are answering the 16? Yes, and there's the no vote. 25%. So you can see here that when it comes to actually preparing for your collection, there is a higher number of organizations that do not take into part the collections in their plan. And so that's, again, why we're here and that's what we're going to be discussing in this talk. So you can see emergency planning. There was 88%. I believe was the answer to the first question. And there was 88% of us that had general planning information, but when it comes down to our actual collections, here we see, great. We have 84.6. I'm going to write that down for later. And 15.3%. No, so 22 and 4 to the first question. And we have basically 60 and 49. So we have 13 and nine per second. So that is why we're here. Long story short, mitigation in terms of collections is actually a little bit harder to do than the basic planning for putting together emergency plans and contact lists for humans. So let's get back into the talk now that we know our group and who we're talking to. We are going to help with getting information for folks that need planning information. And sorry, I'm jumping ahead of myself here. This was in line with the survey that I took in my thesis research. So when asked about that same group that had originally said that there was basically half and half that had had disaster plans. When I asked the people that had disaster plans, so there was 51% of the organizations had had disaster plans in 2007 when the survey was taken. Of that 50%, there was only 18% that had plant protection or salvage information in their actual plan. That in 2004 Heritage Health Index reported that 20% of museum collections had been protected. And so it was actually in line. The public garden numbers were in line. With the Heritage Health Index report of 20%, it was about the same, saying that there was actually 80% of collections that were not protected through disaster plans. So we are actually doing better. This group here today is actually doing better. We said that there's about 65%, 50% that do have plans. So that is wonderful to me to hear. We're doing better. So it'd be interesting to take a new survey 10 years later here and discuss that. So we're doing better. It looks like at least through this group that more people are planning. So enough talk about that. Let's get into the FEMA document that will actually give us four phases to work on for planning. I chose to use the FEMA document 3866, which is integrating historical property and cultural resource considerations into hazard mitigation planning for a starting point for a general disaster plan that would be able to be specifically worked on for plant collection. And I chose this because it was simple. So there are four levels of planning that are involved with this document that are organizing your resources, assessing the potential hazards to your collection, what damage could actually occur from floods or fires or earthquakes, looking at those risks and actually developing a plan, some actual mitigation strategies that could provide protection or salvage for issues that happen as a result of those risks coming to reality, and then implementing and monitoring the plan. So here is like a basic outline that I started with. So again, organizing resources. I'm going to try to use my arrow here and see if it works. Mike, can you see the arrow? Is the arrow working here? I'm trying to draw. Okay. So organizing resources, assessing risks, developing a mitigation plan, and implementing the plan and monitoring its process. You can see for all of the information that it's going to take to create a new arrow that I'm thinking of. It actually is condensed into a one-page document. So this is important. We need to keep it simple in order to make sure that it's done. So all of us at nonprofits wear many hats, and so we don't want to get into a process that's going to take an extreme amount of time that none of us have. So looking at this as a one-page document and thinking through in simple terms is going to allow for an efficient, effective plan to be developed. If by any means you have the time to delve into the subject in further detail, you could spend a career developing large planning processes and teams and local networks to help with salvage and mitigation. But for most people's purposes, especially the small collection groups that are going to be here for this talk, keeping it simple is very helpful. So in line with that, this is the next poll. How much time will your organization have to spend putting a plan together? Will your organization have one workday, one to three workdays, or more than three workdays that you can allow on actually putting a plan together? And then I can know how much detail I should get into later in the talk. So that would be helpful if you could keep answering that question. And I'm going to jump ahead to the next slide while we keep answering this question. I'm seeing my little arrow stuck here. The arrow away now. So in wanting to adapt this FEMA document, this original FEMA document was for mitigating hazards in cultural institutions. So I wanted to take that document and see how it would work in botanical collections. So I chose three different gardens, a natural-type garden, a display garden with lots of ornamental plants, and a historic landscape that is more about keeping in line with a look of an old historic estate. And I used information from those case studies to adapt the plan. So here I'm going to be talking about the actual plan in terms of case studies. The first is Adkins Arboretum. Adkins Arboretum is in Maryland, and it is a natural garden. So it actually interprets and does educational programming on the native plants in Maryland. So during a case study, I asked them questions about their collections and what they thought was most important. They were less concerned about specific plants and damage to individual germ plasm. Then they were about being able to take that information and interpret it to their general public and the population that would come back to the gardens after a disaster. They wanted to be able to teach based on the damage and let the public know what happened in an environmental setting after a disaster as a component of the damage. There were a few threatened species that they were interested in mitigating and salvaging. And those species, they were interested in developing plans to share propagations off-site and to potentially, you know, you could dig something up and transplant it to an area that was safer. So they were interested in some specific salvage tactics, but they were more interested in a natural setting in discussing the damage that was going to occur to the garden with their public as an educational opportunity. Brookside Garden is a garden that is in a municipal setting outside of Washington, D.C. It is a display garden and it is heavily focused on ornamental plants and fun educational programming to get the general public into a garden setting. So it has a very different mission than the Adkins Arboretum. In talking with representatives from Brookside Gardens, it was found that the highest priority in terms of salvage and was actually going to be a cleanup, getting everything back together in working order that would be safe enough to have the community be able to come back in and sourcing display plants, annuals and perennials that would look good, that would be able to be plunked back into the garden so that Brookside could be a safe haven for people that had experienced the natural disaster to be able to come back to their garden and enjoy the space as a refuge, a place for a respite after they had been dealing with the damage. So very different results than from the natural garden that had wanted to educate the public on the disaster and how plants recovered. Brookside wanted to use itself as a place for the community to be able to come back and actually just be able to relax and try to enjoy the moments while they were surrounded by personal struggle in dealing with the disaster that they had experienced. So very interesting that these two places had had entirely different results on what the focus of their salvage and recovery efforts were going to be. So the third case study was Longview Housing Gardens and Longview Housing Gardens is down in New Orleans. You saw originally in one of the first slides that I had showed of garden damage that they had experienced Hurricane Katrina damage and during that Hurricane Katrina damage they had experienced a large hit to their collections because you can see, I'm going to use the pointer here again. I'm not going to use the pointer, but the picture to the right is a canal. You can see the chain link in the middle picture is... There we go, thank you, Mike. The picture in the middle is the canal from the garden walkway that you can see in the left-hand picture. So if you're on that walkway, you look out through that chain link fence off to your right and you see that giant canal. So if there was ever a vulnerable garden, it would be Longview Housing Gardens in the fat canal. If it spills over, the garden is underwater. And so they had experienced significant flooding during Hurricane Katrina and they were able to pull their garden back together after the disaster using historical designs. So they had archived their designs that were created for the historic estate and as a component of their disaster planning and salvage, they had plant lists based off their historical designs that they could pull their plant lists from nurseries outside of the area to replant with their historical plants as soon as possible. So having their restoration plan in place before the disasters helps to get salvage done quicker after the damage because they could refer to their plan and not have to start from scratch. So in their garden, they actually wanted to focus on those... They're not close by folks. They're southern folks down there. Southern live folks. Sorry, there's my open, close by folks. But they wanted their focus in disaster damage to be on tree mitigation because in their landscape, without those trees, the gardens below suffered. So any old camellias that needed shade or other types of collections that had depended on the canopy of those trees if those trees were gone, then the collections below would suffer. So in their garden, they wanted to focus on any mitigation strategies they could use to get those trees healthier so that they could recover from the damage faster and shade the gardens below quicker after the issue had happened. And so very interesting results that in the historic site, you're focusing on the canopy cover and you're focusing on the historical designs and plans that had been in place for a long time to use as your mitigation strategy. So we looked at three different gardens for the case studies, and they had three pretty different results. So their results depended on their mission. So the natural garden wanted to educate. The display garden wanted to replace and be a place for solids and respite. The historic site wanted to make their collection, keep their collection safe by creating the canopy cover and converting the damaged gardens back to the historic landscape as soon as possible. So this is very interesting information that we were able to get from the case studies. We talked before this case study discussion about the amount of time switching hats again back to how much time your organization would have to put a plan together. So can we have that slide back up that had the results of question number three? Let's see how much actual time that you're going to have to put your plan together. So I can see here is there three plus, I'm not getting the three plus work days information in my little text box that shows the answers. Is there, here we go. This is great news. So many of you are going to be able to have more than three working days to put your plan together. That's ideal. So that's really wonderful. So we can talk in a little bit more detail. For those of you that don't have the luxury of having more than three work days to put your plan together, you just won't be able to get as details, but you'll be able to focus on the specific information that is most, the highest priority. So you can focus on highest priority and as time allows you can add to that basic document that you can create with more information. So thank you, Mike, for that. Fine. Let's look at the last question here that we have, which is of the institutions that do want to create a disaster planning strategy, are there specific plants in your collection that you're interested in safeguarding? So I know we're a general museum-based organization that I'm discussing this topic with here today, and I was interested in knowing if, even though you're a museum-based organization, if there are specific living collections or specific plants that you would like to have information about. So yes. So that's why you're here. Great. So we have quite a few of you that do have specific living collections. Okay. Verifying that we are here for the right reason. Okay. So thank you, Mike. Move on to the next slide. We are going to go into detail now about some interviews that were conducted during thesis research. And these interviews, again, were in order to adapt the FEMA documents into documents that would help with botanical collections and not just general. So we talked to nine interview sites about specific damage that they had incurred during damage to specifically hurricanes and flooding were the two main disasters that most had incurred damage from. And I'm excited to see that some of the organizations that I visited are here during the talk today. So you'll be able to chat on the side if I say something that doesn't add up and jump right in in the chat and set me straight. So the first interview site that I went to was the Louisiana State University's Horticultural Research Center, which is called the Burden Center. And if you have a collection that is research-focused, you have some specific plants that you are growing in your collections that nobody else on earth has. So I'm assuming that in a research setting you are developing new cultivars, you are sowing seeds from plants that have been collected on expeditions where nobody has gone before to collect seeds. You have important, important germ plasm in your collection. So in order to identify which plant or which, it's very important to either write on the pot, the size of the actual nursery pot, what plants is contained in that pot. It's important to take your labels and actually stick your labels way down in the dirt and have another one in the top. So if something comes through and knocks all the tags out of the pots that are at surface level and you actually have some documentation of what that specimen is, some places this Burden Center actually had gone through and identified locations of specific plants with a mapping system before a disaster occurred so that they could go back and identify where things had started. So things are going to end up in different places, at least you know where they had started. So that is some very specific information that the Burden Center shared. Very helpful. New Orleans Botanical Garden has been hit very hard quite a few times, and I was able to talk with them about their Katrina damage. So this is very interesting that after Katrina, they were actually able to get some power up through generators and the city to light their organization up for a holiday event. So the rest of the city was dark and they were bright. And the community like in Brookside Gardens wanting to be a place for some refuge, they were able to create a public environment that was very happy for a community that had been hit hard. So that was something that ended up creating a surplus in money for them to be able to help them recover. So it's not only a wonderful thing for the community, but it actually helped their bottom line and allowed them to get back up quicker than they would have been otherwise. Would have been able to otherwise. So I thought that was a very interesting thing that they had shared. They tested their soils after the flooding that had happened. It's very important if you have valuable specimens in the soil and not in containers to test your soil and see what's been released during the flooding. You will definitely have to do some sort of soil mitigation after a flooding and you'll want to see how bad and how deep you'll have to delve into that soil mitigation. So hopefully a long leech would be able to get most of the salts out. But if there's any hazardous materials, oils, and toxins that have been released into the soil, you don't want them to affect your special plant collections. It's very important to test your soils after a flooding type event. And an interesting thing that they had chosen to do was to plant and replant riparian species in their canopy cover because they can withstand flooding. So riparian trees are typically types of trees that grow along corridors of rivers and creeks and streams. So they're used to having their feet wet, which means their roots can be underwater for periods of time without them dying. And so that is also an interesting thing to think about in terms of managing your canopy so that the rest of your garden, like it longs you, doesn't get burnt after a disaster. And you can plant some species that are adapted to the natural disasters on site as long as your design allows. If you're in a historic site, then you're stuck to whatever the historical designs specify. But if you have the choice, you may look at what disasters are in the area that are typical for your garden and, say, in California, plant a fire-adapted species that may be chaparral and regrow from the roots or burnt bark faster than a species that is not fire-adapted. So next, I discussed disaster, damage, and planning for mitigation with the City of New Orleans Department of Landscape Architecture. They discussed in FEMA contracts to not only include cleanup and recovery, but also maintenance for a year. If it's a possibility to include maintenance in your contract, that would help because your staff is going to be occupied with putting the facility and the programming back together. If you can have maintenance crews come in and help to do some of that soil mitigation, help to do some of the canopy regeneration, fertilization efforts, and general cleanup, then it will free up your staff to be able to focus on some of the organizational and programmatic recovery that may be necessary. And they also pointed out that it was more successful for them when they had replanted specific areas, gardens, parks, instead of trying to spread themselves too thin and do recovery across the whole city all at once, they were able to be more successful in focusing on specific areas because then they could give it all of their attention and then move on to the next. At Montgomery Botanical Center, two important points that were discussed during interviews was that if you have a collection of plants that is very important, you need to have the people that know which plants are important to do the original assessment. So if you have somebody that's not qualified to do the original assessment, there may be plants that are missed, that could be salvaged, there may be plants that are high priority, that are not valued at high priority, that are missed. So the person, the horticulturist, and the curators that know the collection should be the ones initially to assess and triage before general clean-ups begin. And that seems like it would be kind of obvious, but after a disaster, everyone is scattered and people are trying to help. You have volunteers showing up that want to do something, but before they get their chainsaws out, you need to have the curators assess the damage that's happened. And we also discussed edge effects. So during a hurricane or strong wind, potentially even some minor flooding events, the edge effects, think of a mangrove area in a marshy setting. The mangroves act to be a barrier between the ocean and the island. So if you have a garden where you have an arboretum where there's a large set of plants surrounded by, maybe say fields or meadows, the edge of your collection is going to be more vulnerable than the center of your collection. So in certain cases, leaving felled trees from prior disasters both gives the trees a chance to regenerate some back so you can propagate them for future specimens, but it also creates a wind block for future damage that could potentially happen. Here's where I saw Chad on the general chat. Hi, Chad. We discussed damage at Naples Botanical Garden. So this was a very interesting chat in that they pointed out that local resources could potentially provide very important resources that you could use for mitigation and salvage practices. So it's very important to look into your local universities, your local extension agents, and even the municipal setting, the city government or the counties to see if there are preparation and mitigation materials that are produced for site-specific, not site-specific, but regionally specific information about disasters. And if you have, second point here, if you have pre-charged your handheld GIS unit, it will work off that battery after a disaster when there's all the power is out to everything else. You can actually assess your damage with a nice handheld pre-charged unit if you have thought about that and have it ready. Again, things move in disasters. So if you have a starting point and you have an end point, you might have some idea of what had happened during the occurrence that might be able to help guide your salvage. So if a tree was thrown from point A to point B, palm trees, I didn't know before I had done all this research for my thesis, a palm tree, if its roots are intact, a palm tree can actually be taken from the place that it was thrown and plunked back in its original spot. And if you do some serious work to amend the soils and fertilize appropriately and shade the tree, give it all the opportunities it needs to have success, it can actually regrow. So it's very interesting in terms of salvage to know what's happened to your question. But point B, GIS, I see in the questions, is a geographical information system. So it's a locational, it's like GPS, but in a handheld unit geographical information system that you can use to pinpoint a location on a plant. So if you have, like I said, if you knew where the plant was to begin with, using your old GIS data, your location mapping data, then you can see where the plant either moved after the disaster or you'll know where to replant based on where it originally was. Does that answer your question, Daniel? So Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden obviously is in hurricane territory because it is in southern Florida for people that don't know. So they said that they had actually gotten some FEMA money to recollect seeds for damaged collections. Now this was 10 years ago. I don't know that that is currently true for today. There's been a lot of damage unfortunately in the last 10 years and there's been resources. So that possibility may not be true, but it's something to look into. So if you have expeditions to countries that have specific plant materials important to your collection, you may be able to, if not from FEMA, from some other organization, grant-wise, to go back and get your germ plasm recollected to begin your collection again. And again here, this is another research tip to write the accession number for the plant that is in the pot on the side of the pot because you never know if after a disaster the plant will be in the same pot that it was originally in. So if you can attach some kind of aluminum tag to the actual plant, that would be important also. But if not, then writing the accession number on the pot. And sometimes it's actually in organizations they'll put plants on their side before the disaster because the disaster is going to come through with high winds and knock plants down in many cases anyway. So there's less damage if you're doing it beforehand. That's another tip. Sometimes I see new people do that. Gifford Arboretum was another interview site that I went to. They discussed planting small specimens that could root into the soil themselves. So if you have a large container and you plunk it in the ground, it's already developed a root system and it is not going to develop little teeny tiny cedar roots that turn into giant, large scaffolding roots. It is going to have those preset roots that it had in the pot and then develop a network of smaller roots outside of that 24-inch pot. So if you have a one-gallon pot and you put that into the ground, it's developing those scaffolding roots from the start. And so those scaffolding roots are going to get into that native soil and dig its little roots in deep. So it's very important to plant small specimens when possible so that your root system can be as natural as possible. And more logistically, a second point refers to appropriate oversight in terms of cleanup procedures. Again, you want to make sure that people that know the collection are watching the cleanup. Make sure that items that are game-chainsawed are lesser priority than items that would need hand sawing or more careful mitigation strategies. Sometimes a cleanup crew would come across a path and see a tree in a path and they just cut it up into pieces. Well, if you have the right people monitoring the cleanup process, they can say, well, is there a different way of doing that in just putting the tree back upright instead of chainsawing right through it? So that's a general logistical tip. So again, we talked about the soil layers at the Kampong, which is another tropical, it's a national tropical botanical garden in southern Florida. It's their site there. They also have a site in Hawaii. The Kampong is the southern Florida site that had had extensive hurricane damage in the past. And they again talked about soil layers being very important to creating a healthy tree and root system. And if root systems had been damaged in the past, they had had success with canopy sprinklers to water the tops of the trees when the bottoms of the trees weren't taking up any water. So some tropical specimens can be assisted through tropical overhead watering, which is important to think about. We have a few more interviews here that I'm going to be discussing. And the one of these last ones is Vestaya Museum House and Garden. This is actually the last one. So this is a beautiful old historic garden. They are right next to Bay where they are very vulnerable to damage. And so they... Vestaya discussed that replanting with salt-tolerant plants was helpful. So they had spat in salt water for days, almost a week at some point. And so if you have plants that are going to be damaged by salt, then it is important to think about specimens when you're replanting that may not be as heavily affected by that flooding. So again, we talked about the edge effect at Montgomery Botanical Garden. The mangroves, like I was talking about, act as a barrier from storm surge. And so if you have peripheral parts of your garden that you could plant with hedges, to the forearms, junipers, feeders, anything that would provide a barrier to your internal collections, that may be important in reducing some of that edge effect. So that's an interesting tip that they had talked about. And they had also recommended country services as a great resource for many organizations. So all the themes that were discussed with individual gardens, I laid out in a chart to see who had talked about the same theme. These are some of the major themes that were discussed. And as you can see here, the items that were discussed most were the volunteer help. You can see there are six organizations that had talked about having volunteers assist in a large helpful capacity after an event. There was six organizations that had discussed dispersing plants and seeds off-site. So taking your germplasm and making sure that for your highest priority plants and collections, you're not the only garden or site that has those specimens. So if they're a historic tree from the founder of the site, the state that you work for, you want to have crop of yields of that tree, you want to have vegetative cuttings of that tree, living off-site in other regions, so that if something happens to that tree, you could get that germplasm back from those outside organizations and replant to that historic community where if you hadn't done that, then your germplasm would be lost. You'd never have that tree to replant. So dispersing plants and seeds off-site. And then just in terms of practicality, after disasters, if you have a botanical collection, you're going to need water to keep that collection going after a disaster. And if you don't have a backup water source, then you're going to be in trouble. So having a backup water source was something that six of the nine gardens had discussed has been very important. We have gone through the interviews. We've gone through case studies, and we've talked about surveys in terms of natural disaster damage to plant collections. Let's see if some of you have some specific plants that you would like to actually talk about at the end of the discussion here. So if you do, here's the answer to that original question. It says that 16 of you do. If you have something that you would like to talk about specifically, go ahead and in the general chat type in a couple words about what that collection or plant is, and then we'll see at the end after I've discussed revisions to the FEMA documents and a little case study. We'll see if we can get to some of those specific plants if you want to see what the community would say about how you can prioritize or salvage those collections. So here we go. I am going to talk a little bit about the revisions that were made to the FEMA documents based on the case studies and the interviews that were made. I'm going to skip this a little back over here. Many of the organizations that I interviewed and did the case studies talked about having staff and volunteer contact lists, a preset and ready to go, equipment lists ready to go of what equipment you'd need to either chainsaws or crane replanting strategies, what to focus on, what to prioritize, and also creating help networks before a disaster happened. It's easier to touch base with people and have lunch and discuss how you can help one another before a disaster hits than being hit by something and then having to ask for help. Everybody's going to need help at that point, so you want to try to make it as efficient as possible by knowing who you can count on before a disaster. So the original document was changed quite a bit. You can see all the different colors that were changed, due to case studies, interviews, general feedback or information that I had learned through going through different conferences. And this is less blurry, the last five is a little blurry. You can see the amount of information that was changed on that original human document. So we've talked about the template. We have talked about specific information that I learned from interview sites. Let's actually go through the document itself and talk about how to build a plan. So timing-wise, I'm going to take about 10 minutes to discuss this, and after I discuss this, we will field some questions. So I actually am going to use my current organization, Children's Fairyland, as a case study for a quick little building of a template. So the first thing that you want to do in developing a plan for your organization's disaster management plan is organizing resources. So at Children's Fairyland, getting support for the project and building a team to work with and engaging employees is the first step. In red, you will see below. All this red information is the general information for Fairyland's emergency planning team. Verbally, I'm going to be discussing what I would do for a plant collection. So you can see the difference between the red is the written for the general information, and verbally, I will be discussing what I would do for a plant collection plan. So getting support for the project, I would need to actually get my boss, a facilities manager, I'm the landscape supervisor. I would need to get my boss on board with protecting the collections. So getting support for the project is getting my staff in line with the general staff. Creating and distributing a staff contact list is a general piece of the equation that would be included. Creating a cleanup effort to resource list would be different for a plant collection than it would be for the general plan. So in the general plan, we're going to talk to our city, which is the landlord. We're going to talk to a utilities locator, which would be helpful for electric and for gas and for sewer and water locations. We're going to talk to local contractors. But in terms of creating a cleanup effort resource list, that's going to look different for a botanical collection. So I am going to talk to local arborists that I have done work with before. I'm going to talk to lawn hear specialists that I've had to utilize before and create a resource list using them and not the general. Emergency responders and horticultural contacts list them out that we can call for help and aid after an event. We're lucky here in the Bay Area. We have a group of colleagues called the Bay Area Gardens Network. We have an informal email list that we all communicate with one another through. And so that would be a resource that would be very valuable after disaster events occurred to get information from. There is also some extension help that we may be able to utilize through the University of California's extension system. And having those horticultural contacts in place would be very important to children's fairyland oak trees, in particular. So after we've looked at organizing some resources, we are going to develop a plan. So in order to develop that plan, you need to assess your risk. So at Children's Fairyland, the general risk that we could incur include earthquakes, high winds, fires, drought, and urban disturbance. In terms of our plant collections, our trees would be hit the worst by high winds, fires, droughts, and potentially urban disturbance. Included is also freezes in our horticultural hazards that would not be generally a problem in our general facilities hazards, because freezes can damage the plants. Freezes generally are building for strong enough to withstand the heavy frost. So that is a good thing for children's fairyland. We would want to talk to our longtime staff members about what hazards had happened in the past to see if what I was thinking had been in line with the historical reality of the site. Just because I've been there seven years doesn't mean that hazard hasn't happened 22 years ago that I wouldn't know about. So talking with your long-term employees and board members or volunteers is very important. So evaluating your collections and plants for high value. At Children's Fairyland, I am the same as long as you have some gardens. My canopy is most important. So my oak trees are what is providing shade for visitors. They are what is shading the collections underneath. We have a nice chamelea collection. We have some rhododendrons, mizalias. And if those oak trees were gone, I would be in trouble. So I'm going to prioritize my salvage based on those oak trees, because without the oak trees, the rest of my garden is going to suffer. So assessing monetary replacement values for these trees before a disaster would be important. I could talk to my city tree department. I could talk to those arborists that I had used for general cleanup services before to try to assess the replacement value for these trees. And I could assess the historical or social significance of these trees with my community. I could also ask my community if there are other items that I'm missing besides the oak trees. What is important to the visitors of Children's Fairyland and why? So the third phase in developing a plan is mitigation planning. So deciding what plants to focus on and then seeing what it would take to keep those plants safe. So deciding what plants to focus on, we were just talking about potentially talking with the stakeholders about what they think is important besides just me, because although I'd love for my word to be the last, it is not. So it's important to see what those stakeholders also think is important. Within those collections of important plants, what are you going to focus on most during the disaster? So again, for me, it's the oak tree. But for somebody else, let's say, there's the Luther Burbank estate up in the North Bay. So Luther Burbank was a plantsman who developed many, many, many cultivars of plants that became commercially and agriculturally important. So he has a Santa Rosa plum up there and some potatoes that he developed that are extremely important. And so for his collection and interpreting his importance to the plant world, those plants would be the most important at that state. So deciding what plants or items to focus on, you want to know what to prioritize by making those decisions. In terms of keeping those highest priority plants or collection items safe, you want to actually specifically look at what those plants are and how to keep them safe. So for my oak trees, let's say, I want to try to encourage healthy groups so that they are strong specimens that can rebound after an event. I want to eliminate as many of the test problems that I can that are sapping energy from the trees before an event so that they're healthy and can rebound quicker after. Again, as with the other sites that we talked about in the interview theme that needed water after a disaster, I want to make sure that I'm going to have access to some water to be able to get them from H2O if they needed after a huge event in order to keep them happy. And when it comes to actual mitigation planning, you're going to need a team to come in and help after the disaster. So deciding who is going to implement the plan, who's going to be there to safeguard the collection, and again, make sure that the chainsaw action that is happening during the salvage and cleanup is appropriate and not excessive. The scenarios would be different for different disasters. So if my oak trees experienced a fire, that would be very different than if my oak trees experienced an unfortunate riot. So that's not a natural disaster, but that is one of the threats that we have in an urban setting is having people jump the fence and create damage. So what is the responsibility going to be for the staff in those different scenarios? Are we going to hire security? Are we going to set the sprinklers on in a fire and run the sprinklers so that the area is wet beforehand so it would have potentially less damage due to the moisture and humidity in the air than it would have if there was dry tenders to light up? So think about the different scenarios, the different hazards, and what the actual response would have to be for those different disasters. Do you want to talk about who the first person is going to be back on scene? If I'm the landscape supervisor and I cannot be on scene, how is the next person going to know down the list what to focus on? We need to have an initial recovery person or group ready so that you can document damage, assess the safety, and start mitigation practices. And it needs to be communicated with multiple people and be stored in not only at the gardens but off-site so that if one person can't access the recovery plan, another person will be able to. And in that plan you want to have who is going to be able to contact the emergency response team and potential security or police forces. So we're almost there. We have talked about a plan. We've talked about how to salvage specific plants. We are going to implement the plan and monitor its progress. So you want to write the plan up and keep it in a safe place. You want to make sure that, again, it's on-site and off-site. So on your server, on a network server so that multiple people have access to it. We're going to talk with organizations both in and out of the area, so regional and out of the region organizations to help with recovery. Organizations that are in the area are also going to be hit by the potential natural disaster. So you want folks that are out of the area to be partners to be able to come back and help you. If they're safe, then they can come in and help you with your cleanup and salvage. And again, contacting local university extension offices, county agencies, they may already have some research and planning materials for you to be able to utilize. Once you have a plan, you want to make sure that it's updated annually. Staff and plants change, so you want to make sure that both changes are accounted for. You want to have a review annually. So do that the same week every year so it becomes routine. And here in California, in October, we have the great ShakeOut. And it's an opportunity for schools and community organizations to all do an earthquake drill on the same day. So it becomes routine. People know that it's going to come. They're not surprised by it. And they get into the practice of dealing with an issue so that it isn't a surprise if and when it does happen. You want to build those partnerships during that week so that you have them and they're ready to go before a plan happens. So you can test your plan. You can evaluate its effectiveness after a disaster. And that's important because you can lessons learned. If you actually, unfortunately, have to deal with a disaster, you'll be able to know whether or not the plan that you had originally created is going to work. So go ahead and evaluate the effectiveness of the plan and make sure that is written up in a new plan that would either be the same or be even better than your original plan. And lastly here, you want to communicate the plan that you've created to your staff members. So what good is an annual update and an annual walkthrough if half the staff is added in midway through the year and doesn't know anything about the plan? New staff members definitely need to be updated during new hire training on what is going on with the plan and the processes for dealing with a disaster. So we have talked about finding general resources here. We've talked about specific plant-based information being during surveys, case studies, and interviews. We've talked about revision to a FEMA document 3866 on developing a more plant-based collection template. And we've talked about a case study using my organization Children's Fairyland as a model. I want to remind you about general planning resources that I have on the first slide. Here are some actual physical links that you can use. These are also in the handouts that you can download down below. So no need to stress about writing anything down. They're already in the handouts. These are garden-specific resources. So American Public Gardens Association has a wonderful disaster response center that they've created to help one another before and after disasters. That's the last bullet point here down on the bottom. Please go to that if you have a botanical collection that you're interested in safeguarding. It is a very wonderful resource for you to be able to use. There is a library and media center within the APGA website. If you type in disaster or disaster planning in that search box, you'll get all kinds of wonderful resources. My thesis is actually the full thesis is actually in that media center. So you can have access to the more in-depth information in that thesis. And as I was mentioning, in 2009, the American Public Gardens Association actually added a disaster planning requirement for addition of an accredited plant collection to be considered a part of their network. So if you are interested in learning about how to comply with the new standards, please look up the middle link there for the American Public Gardens Association Plant Collections Management Program. And we are getting close to the end here. This is a wonderful presentation that was given at the American Public Gardens National Conference last year in 2018 in Anaheim. If you are interested in some more specific information about botanical collections and their planning for damage to your collections, please look this presentation up. It is a great resource for you. It's called Thriving in Disaster. And you can see it in that library in Media Center in the American Public Gardens Association. So we have just a couple minutes for questions. Here's some disasters at Children's Fair. And I think here's a swirl eating the stomach of the bonnet and some flooding that happens at the base of the Wonder Go Round, the Allison Wonder Go Round. So I have one question here about bromeliads and orchids established in trees in the garden. How to safeguard, I'm assuming, bromeliads and orchids that are established in trees in the garden. So if it was me, long story short, I would make sure that those orchids and bromeliads were actually pulled out of those trees before a hurricane was going to come through. If you don't, those bromeliads and orchids will be in the neighboring garden after the event. So if that is not an option, I would see us taking a crop of yields of those, a vegetative cutting. Bromeliads you can divide. So you might be able to divide those bromeliads and get separate crop yields to have in a safer environment during a disaster. Orchids may or may not have vegetatives cuttings or crop yields that you would be able to divide and take. So those orchids would be something that you may want to take down out of those trees before the garden. Sometimes you can have put them in pots and then attach the pots to the tree so it would be removable. If it was a very important item, then that might be something that you could do. Otherwise having a replacement strategy, so bromeliad and orchid, tropical fern grower that's outside of your region, having a contract with them before just a standing contract to say if there's a disaster, I'm going to be the first person that you're going to sell to to replace my bromeliads and orchids. If that would be allowed in your budget, that may be something that would be important to have a replacement strategy for those bromeliads and orchids. Does any other botanical person that's here in the talk have any other ideas that she could use for her bromeliads and orchids that are established in the tree? If so, please add in the general chat. Otherwise, I think that is all the time that we have. Please fill in the course evaluations. I'm going to add a few things to the handout before I post it. So I will post the recording, the PowerPoint slides, the handout, the planning template, and I will post those as soon as you no longer see the ad for this webinar on our website. You'll know that all of that is in the archives through 2019. And join us next month for old loans. In May, we're going to do something on care of herbaria, which may be of interest to many of you. And I'm also going to post, we did a webinar a few years ago on living animal collections that might be related to several things that Jackie said today. So we'll see you next month. Remember that we have the reward course coming up if you're interested in that. And all of our webinars are available free to listen to. Courses cost something, but the webinars