The following are examples of recent education and outreach activities by our project:
 

• In addition to managing field activities, Kevin Skeen is a high school math teacher. He uses data from our project in his statistics and math classes at Woodlake High School. The Woodlake students are largely Hispanic with parents who work in the San Joaquin Valley agricultural sector.

• We regularly share hydrochemical, climatic and hydrologic data from the Tokopah Valley and Emerald Lake with university researchers and resources managers. In a recent example we provided Dr. Gary Larson with long-term temperature data from several Sierra Nevada lakes to be used in a regional evaluation of the taxonomic compositions of zooplankton assemblages in lakes of the Sierra Nevada, Cascades, Rocky Mountains, and the Yukon and Northwest Territories.

• Research at Emerald Lake and Tokopah Valley are used by the National Park Service in interpretative programs to demonstrate the role of scientific research in the National Parks and as an integral part of resource assessment and monitoring programs.

The Western Airborne Contaminants Assessment Project utilized two lakes in the Tokopah Valley (Pear and Emerald) owing to our detailed knowledge of lake bathymetry and existing records of hydrochemistry.

• The NPS Sierra Nevada Network (SIEN) conducts long-term monitoring programs to access status and trends of resources in Yosemite and Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Parks. Data from the Tokopah has been used in the design of Inventory and Monitoring Programs for Climate, Lakes and Streams (http://science.nature.nps.gov/im/ units/sien/monitoring/).

• Our hydrochemical data have been particularly useful in sensitivity analysis and design of the SIEN lake-monitoring protocol (Heard et al. 2007). Long-term data from the Tokopah Valley has been used in three recent Natural Resources Condition Assessments (Edwards and Redmond 2011, Andrews 2012; Day and Conklin 2012). The US Forest Service has used data from Emerald Lake and our lake surveys to develop screening procedures for identifying acid-sensitive lakes, and we have assisted Forest Service and NPS scientists with lake sampling methods, water quality QA/QC and statistical assessments of long-term data.