Multiple Indicator Monitoring - MIM

Team 1, minus me, measuring pools

Two weeks ago I traveled to Elko, NV to take a week long class on Multiple Indicator Monitoring. I was planning on camping two nights and getting a hotel the last two nights. My plan was to camp at South Fork State Recreation Area, which is about 14 miles south of Elko. The first night was really nice. It was great to be camped out next to the water and have a nice quite campground with clean bathrooms and water. The second night however, I got back from class to find that the wind was crazy intense and my tent was pretty much leveled from the wind--not broken though, thank goodness. I sat in my tent for about 2 minutes and decided there was no way I was going to be able to sleep like this, so I decided I'd get a hotel a night earlier than planned.

The first two places I looked at were extremely expensive. At one of the expensive hotels the front desk lady was super apologetic, saying that they charge those prices because apparently Elko gets a lot of contract workers, whose companies pay for their rooms. Luckily, I was able to find a nice, clean, room at a reasonable price at the Econo Lodge, which happened to be about a block from the BLM office where the class was being held, so that was awesome!

Alright, back to class! Multiple Indicator Monitoring (MIM) is a protocol used in riparian management, it is designed to be a tool used in monitoring streambanks, stream channels and streamside vgetation. During our training, we got to go to two creek sites in the Elko area--nothing better than walking in a creek in the middle of a hot summer day! The creek we spent most of our time at was Trout Creek. We monitored two sections of Trout Creek. One section of the creek was outside of an enclosure, and has had heavy grazing occurring in and around the creek. The second section of the creek was within the enclosure and used to have heavy grazing, but not any longer. Unfortunately, I do not know how long the enclosure has been up.

In the MIM protocol, there are 10 indicators that can be looked at (you don't need to use all 10), 3 are short term indicators and 7 are long term indicators. The short term indicators are stubble height, streambank alteration and woody species use. The long term indicators are greenline composition, woody species height class, streambank stability and cover, woody species age class, greenline-to-greenline width, substrate and residual pool depth and pool frequency.

The MIM class was a lot of fun, the people were really nice and I learned quite a bit--especially that I need to work on my riparian grasses.

Anyway, here are some pictures from my MIM adventure:

The class making the plant list

A cute little gopher friend!

Where's that greenline?

The deepest pool in our DMA--Designated Monitoring Area