Trees, Applied Ecology, and the Soil Inventory Project with Kris Covey

Welcome back to Environmental Professionals Radio, Connecting the Environmental Professionals Community Through Conversation, with your hosts Laura Thorne and Nic Frederick! 

On today’s episode, we talk with Kris Covey, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Sciences at Skidmore College, and the Co-founder and President of the Soil Inventory Project about Trees, Applied Ecology, and the Soil Inventory Project.   Read his full bio below.

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Showtimes:
1:18  Nic & Laura discuss when nature calls
5:53  Interview with Kris Covey starts
12:10  Applied Ecology
20:24  Trees
26:39  The Soil Inventory Project
36:11  Field Notes

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This podcast is produced by the National Association of Environmental Professions (NAEP). Check out all the NAEP has to offer at NAEP.org.

Connect with Kris Covey at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristofer-covey-4ab66926/

Guest Bio:
Kris Covey is an Assistant Professor in the Environmental Studies and Sciences Program at Skidmore College where he studies terrestrial ecosystems and their role in climate and life. An Applied Ecologist, and a Biogeochemist, Kris works to integrate his research into solutions for managing human dominated landscapes for multiple values. After designing the global study that provided the first robust estimate of number of trees on earth (3.04 trillion), Kris turned his focus to large-scale soil carbon mapping using a novel combination of existing technologies. Prior to joining the faculty at Skidmore College, Dr. Covey was the Lead Scientist at the Ucross High Plains Stewardship Initiative and a Lecturer in Forest Dynamics at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. There, he co-founded the Western Research Fellowship at the Ucross Highplains Stewardship Initiative and the Quick Carbon research program, served as a member of the School's Diversity and Inclusion Strategy Committee, and as a member of Yale University’s Carbon Offset Task Force. As a contributor to the Global Carbon Project's Methane Working Group, Kris authored the vegetation section of the Global Methane Budget. He serves as a member of the Board of Trusties for The Adirondack Nature Conservancy and the New York State Wood Products Development Council.
 
In 2020 Kris Co-Founded The Soil Inventory Project (TSIP.org) along with Bruno Basso. Together with private, industry, academic, and foundation partners they are building a distributed national-scale soil inventory system to inform soil management and markets. Through a novel combination of app-based automated sampling design, and distributed soil sampling tools allowing anyone to collect near surface soil samples, TSIP is building regional scale models capable of linking individual producer practices to measurable outcomes.

Music Credits
Intro: Givin Me Eyes by Grace Mesa
Outro: Never Ending Soul Groove by Mattijs Muller

Transcript

Speaker 1  
Hello and welcome to EPR your favorite environmental enthusiast Nick and Laura. On today's episode, Laura and I discussed when nature calls. We talked to Chris Covey about trees Applied Ecology and the soil inventory problem. And finally, there are no traffic lights in Bhutan because everyone apparently just drives very safely.

Nic  
Another fun fact, the country has never been conquered, and they were also the last country to introduce TV way back in 1998. But how about that? So yeah, hit that music

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Laura  
Yes, precision for today. So yeah, it's not fair. And could do

Speaker 2  
lots of things out in the field when someone says oh, she could have been fine with me but

Laura  
it was in the field in Florida. Not a tree insights, no hills in sight. out with a bunch of clients, dudes. What are you gonna do? Like, the guys are just like, Alright, everybody looked the other way. Work or girls actually went down the side of a bank towards the stream and then you know, it was like squatting ready, and then Oh, hi, alligator.

Nic  
Oh, gosh. Yeah,

Laura  
on top of it all can be dangerous. Yeah,

Nic  
no, it's best to work in that forest for this exact reason because it's much much easier to hide and then wow, this bear pooped in the woods so crazy. I don't know. It's we got to be careful for those

Laura  
guys on boats and they just go off the back. We look over here. Yeah. Y'all.

Nic  
I know. I know. You're not wrong. I have nothing to say other than your

Laura  
but this is a if you're new to working in the field like working in the field or anything.

Speaker 3  
going potty? I just it's part of the reason why I don't really

Speaker 4  
like field work because I'm very comfortable with bathrooms, right?

Nic  
Yeah, most people do most but luckily

Speaker 3  
when I have gone I just there's no origins so good. So far. Yes. Probably because I starved myself because I'm on.

Nic  
Well, yeah, so you do feel broken for us versus a desert for example. There's some difference but like they both have like, you know, hills and such. So there's always a place to go high and I just remember I was getting you know, the deserts want you know, those are hot it's so hot and I just remember like, doing my business using the bathroom and then like be like, Did I do anything? Is like like evaporated almost. It was instantaneous and it was just gone. I'm like, Man, this place needs some water. I guess we are in the desert. You know? There was like a full day I feel that you kind of have to write you can't not? Yeah, you're out there for hours. That are happening to me. No, I

Laura  
think one of our guests had

Nic  
that was on the field. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I hadn't been I mean, I've seen snakes in the field, but I haven't seen any like that I would be concerned about I almost have to like comprehend. That's unfair. I didn't almost do that. But I mean,

Laura  
for me the worst was like vote runs and they can run eight, nine hours times. And in the summer, we can do the water. Winter, cold, raining. No, but the worst is like, you know, girls have certain days it's not pleasant to be in the field. For more than a couple of hours. But nobody asks you or cares. You have work to do. And those days can be more challenging.

Unknown Speaker  
Sure.

Laura  
And I'm not we won't share stories. I've talked to other women about their experiences and you guys don't know what we do. To get the work done in the field. You know, you're ready to go.

Yeah, so those of you listening like girls out there if you haven't

Nic  
that's fine. I think even one of our program managers is actually collecting data on women in the field. That exact thing, trying to get an answer for like, you know, what do we need to make it easier for women to work in the field? Yeah, so that's pretty cool. Yeah, she

Unknown Speaker  
was everywhere.

Laura  
Yeah, from salt.

Nic  
Desert I'm sure that'd be fine.

Laura  
Let's get to our

Speaker 1  
All right. Hello, and welcome back to EPR today we have Chris Covey, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Sciences at Skidmore College and the co founder and president, the soil inventory product on the show. Welcome, Chris. Hi, thanks

Nic  
for having me. You start by telling us a little bit about your career path that led you to becoming an assistant professor in environmental studies.

Kristofer Covey  
Yeah, I am. A windy, windy path for me. Went up to college. The northern edge of the Adirondacks has started to place to the Canton to your technical college and I got interested in physics I started doing a physics degree there and I finished up at SUNY Potsdam and pretty quickly realized there aren't a lot of jobs for people to drop balls and I worked as a carpenter for a while I was a whitewater kayaker for a little while. And then I got a job on the Hudson River dredging project. I was working in their core processing lab and going in in the middle of the night to this facility in Fort Edward and putting on Tyvek and cleaning out PCB filled sediment from tubes at three in the morning, you know, and that was great. And a job came available to be a seventh and eighth grade. Science teacher and to teach high school environmental science and I started teaching and it was it was amazing. I loved it. And that environmental science class had, you know, kids who had taken biology and chemistry and wanted another science before they went off to college. And then it had kids that had failed biology or chemistry and graduated. Right. And that's in the same, right. That's in the same class with 12 kids. So I was like, We need a project. They need to do something. Yeah. So we started building a campus Arboretum, where kids were growing greenspace trees and planting them out in the community is as green space trees and designing this Arboretum and working with sort of local green skills groups. I realized that I liked working with trees a lot more than I liked talking to people's parents. As a parent, I can assure you that we're awful people. And so I went back to grad school and I had had the good fortune of having a mother in law who had been at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in New Haven, and I would not ever have thought to try and apply to a place like that. But she brought me around and introduced me to folks there and they said, What a cool project. What are you thinking about doing next? And I said, I'd like to be a forester. And so I went to graduate school for forestry, and did a bunch of research just on the side of a master of Forestry and realized I really liked doing research and so I did a PhD. And then I went looking for a small liberal arts college close to home. And my wife and I were both from my wife grew up in Saratoga and went to Skidmore College and I grew up about 15 minutes north in Queensbury, New York. And so this was I mean the job visiting position came up, I got lucky I got that. And then was lucky enough to be in a position where I could stay and so here I am, living this life I could not have imagined. Right,

Nic  
Lee and that's a lot to I love the idea of reasonably ask the question, right? Because there's so many different things that come into play. with who you are as a person, whether it's whitewater rafting, and then this project that you come up with, and then grad school and then where you are now. I guess, like going back to your teaching days, because you're still Are you still teaching in a way now as well? Yes.

Kristofer Covey  
I mean, Skidmore is very much a teaching institution and I have an active research program. But the wonderful thing here is that my colleagues, the institution are all directed towards investment in young people. And so I'm regularly teaching I'm on a research leave right now. I'm on my pre tenure sabbatical. But I am all the time with students. Yeah,

Nic  
yeah. So okay, so how does like the experience you had with seventh and eighth grade science? I actually once I taught biology to art students. So I understand sometimes you get people who are really passionate, and some people who are not. So how did that experience kind of inform how you teach now? Yeah, it's

Kristofer Covey  
funny, you know, when you're at the seventh and eighth grade level so much of what you're doing is about classroom control, right about pacing and keeping people engaged. And I remember going into when you teach seventh eighth grade science in the state of Massachusetts, the curriculum is it's everything. It's from cellular level to planetary motion, you know, it's all of this stuff. And I remember thinking of myself, Okay, well, what did I learn in seventh grade? And I don't know about you, Nick, or Laura, but I didn't remember anything. I didn't remember a thing that I learned in school, but I did remember a math teacher that I really enjoyed and a science teacher that I really enjoyed it. I remember the idea that I really liked being in that class and learning in the class, or whatever it was, they were teaching was just setting me up to get to ninth grade and that was setting me up to get to 10th grade and that was putting me in a position to understand the basics of and love the idea of physics. which then gets me to go to college and study physics. Right. And I think what I took most away from that is that the content is one thing. You really want students to learn how to think and how to think about the world and the subject matter is a path to that, but also that the goal is that we're enjoying ourselves while we're doing this, because that is going to energize you to want to learn the next thing and to dig into the next idea. And I'm not sure if I had started trying to teach adults you know, young adults, college students, this is the end of youth right? I guess I shouldn't say no. But when you go in and you're with seventh and eighth graders, you're very much thinking what is it that I have for you? Why is it that you are going to sit in your chair and get excited and produce something that is and it's largely about making sure that they're having a good time doing what they're doing?

Nic  
Right? And so yeah, that's when I hit the end of us the title of the episode. But hasn't really cool. That is really mean a lot of perspective there. That's funny, because you have had these projects, these moments in your life. They kind of stick with you as you go along. And I think one of the things that we we saw that we would love to ask you about is your master's working in Bhutan. What was that? What did you do? How does that relate to what you're doing now?

Kristofer Covey  
Yeah, that was another amazing sort of stumbling situation and links up really nicely with the seventh and eighth grade science. So I A at the Yale School of Forestry environmental studies now Yale School of the Environment. They have this wonderful program called mods, which was short for summer modules, which was a legacy of when the field foresters would spend an entire summer camp, learning field skills. And it got sort of revived in the 1980s as a way to bring a class together and build community at the onset. And so you go out before, you know three weeks, they mix up the groups, you go to these different sites and you just do stuff in the field with the folks who are going to be working on masters with for the next two years. And and so it's 100 and whatever people and you know, you one of the things that we did was macroinvertebrate stream sampling. Oh, yeah. Look at the effects of sort of the urban environment on these urban streams around New Haven. And we had done that with with seventh and eighth graders. And I, you know, I didn't belong at Yale. I like to use the people I was there. You know, they've come back from the Peace Corps. They founded these big nonprofits. They've worked up on Capitol Hill. They've done all these amazing things that are from all over the world where you know, what does it take to get from I grew up with a dirt floor in Nepal to I'm studying and doing my masters at Yale, right? This is, so I'm not on a league with these folks. But we're doing this macroinvertebrate sampling and there was this guy moment, and Moe was just so impressed that I could identify these macroinvertebrates he said, Gosh, Chris coffee, you are just so smart, you know. And of course, it's just, I was doing a seventh and eighth grade lab with you know, it was pretty hilarious and Moe had been running with one of the professors at Yale, the national forest inventory for the country of Bhutan. And so, you know, when he knew I was really interested in forestry and that I was spending a lot of time up in the woods and we would casually bump into each other and spend time together mo would say, you know, you should really come to Bhutan. They could use your expertise, you know, which is hilarious. But, uh, you know, in a place like Yale, the resources are there, the connections are there, and I hopped on a plane and I went to a research center in Bhutan and spent you know, I was there for about three months did a bunch of fieldwork saw amazing things I would have never imagined and we put together a nice study of, you know, disturbance dynamics in these amazing Himalayan oak forest.

Nic  
He was wow, that that is so cool. I'm gonna

Laura  
tear for a second that I think that's amazing that you think or thought you didn't fit in because you know what I'm career coaching. I hear this all the time. People think they don't belong or they think that even if they started a new job or something or in the in the University of their ad or program that they're considering going into they all just have these perceived shortcomings and you just don't know what your path is and what that one thing you might bring to the table is no one else has. You don't have to have be best at everything. There might just be one little thing that you're that you're needed for and that's why we're there. I think

Kristofer Covey  
that's it is so important and I was actually thinking about it yesterday, and thinking about you know, I had reconnected with a former mentor recently and we were gonna hop on another project together and thinking about all the things we had done together and and I found myself over and over again, I'm not a great scientist. I'm not a brilliant thinker. I'm not any of those things. And I keep finding myself with these with these amazing people. And it's always for some silly reason, like I knew how to run a chainsaw or I can I like to tinker and so I built a thing with a drill bit new guide a metal shop, and we put it together into a new tool and it's you don't have to be the best at anything. You just I think it's been really helpful to be curious and then people will need whatever it is that you have someone needs it. I think that's really true.

Laura  
It's provide value, whatever it is. Yeah.

Kristofer Covey  
Yeah. You have a good time doing it.

Nic  
Right. Exactly. The king of macroinvertebrates that's that's what I'm right. Yeah, so. So your titles that we see is you're an applied ecologist and a biogeochemist. And those are fun terms. I would love for you to define both of those and kind of relate them to colleges. Why not just chemist? Why not just do biologists, geologists, what are those all kind of work together? Well, so

Kristofer Covey  
the idea of Applied Ecology is that and this is kind of a dirty thing in academics and not in I think thankfully not in the community of academics that I've come from. But the idea that the science that you're doing has real world applications to management, that it can help in my case, land managers try to make better decisions about land or informed decisions about land. And so they're sort of theory and traditions, right, that are developing these grand theories. And in a lot of science, that's considered to be real fundamental science, right? That is real science. And then as soon as you put the word applied on it, then you're saying, Well, I'm kind of a, I walk around in the woods and choose which trees to cut down and it feels a little silly, right then to, but to me, that's important. I want my work to have direct applications to the real world. And so on the ecology side, that's about thinking about how human systems and these biological ecological systems interact, and how our understanding of those biological systems than feeds or ecological systems feeds management and the biogeochemistry part. I mean, again, it's one of these biogeochemist what so another one of these things where I was walking to lunch with a mentor, and we were headed down to the to the food carts, and this guy Mark Bradford had had a, he said, Chris, you're the you're the tree guy. What do you what do you know about methane and trees? I said, Well, I know enough to know that methane and trees is not a thing, Mark. Let's move on. And he said, This photograph. I have this photograph that says you don't know what you're talking about. And he pulled out his his phone and he showed me a picture of a flaming tree corer that his postdoc had taken how working with students the tree they were coring trees started hissing, or one of the students pulled out a lidar and lit it on fire. Mark, that's really cool. I'll ask around a little bit. There were two guys, one guy who's actually still a professor in New Haven, who rode his Harley across the country to take his first job there. Well, Eisenhower was President. He were the like plant biology guys, him and Tom Sikma legendary field ecologist and I talked to them both and I said, Well, you guys know about this. And they said, well, there's there's methane and trees, and there's some papers back there to this from the 70s on that and that kind of sort of chance and encounter and odd conversation. But Mark Broughton ended up bringing me on to this project, because I could identify red maple. Not because I know anything about biogeochemistry I could, oh, that red maple tree and I think it might be gassy because red maples tend to rot and then there was an issue with picking of the right drill bit to drill into the tree and get the gas out with you know, and so I ended up that changed the whole my whole career trajectory. I ended up studying methane and trees for five years. I'm still working on it. I say five years, but that was the heavy part, but I'm back at it now. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker  
Okay, we

Laura  
got macro invertebrates. Crees soil inventory. So we're still collecting all the different things that you do besides just drill bits. Your beds, maybe the common factors. Science needs laborers. Okay. But what's still you have? You do have all this knowledge. You did a study. Okay, so back to trees, a study that created a robust estimate for the number of the trees on the planet. How'd you get involved? In that?

Kristofer Covey  
Yeah, amazing. Again, just being a random guy with one random piece of information. So we used to, we worked out at this lab building really lab. I had somehow I had a conversation with the den Dean. So Peter Green, wonderful guy, just brilliant and wonderfully supportive mentor. I was saying I'm trying to buy an espresso machine for the lounge here in the in the lab and said, any use why? Why are you doing that? And I said, Well, I think if people have a really cool coffee machine, they'll hang out in this place and they'll share ideas and it'll draw people in and we'll create an atmosphere where we're cool things happen. He said, alright, I'll buy the machine. And I wasn't asking him to buy it. And he was like, Cool. Ideally, I'll pay for that. Next to greatness. So we put the machine and then we would have coffee time in there every day. And I was sitting across from this wonderfully dynamic guy, Tom Crowther who now has is you know, sort of running an enormous research enterprise out of your eth in Zurich. But at the time Tom was a fungal ecologist growing fungus in petri dishes, and Tom had a housemate Gregoire, Hendler and Greg Gore had done a project for a class where he had created this graph of sort of tree density he had met a young kid, German guy now an adult to Dr. VHDX, who had founded a nonprofit that was encouraging the UN to plant more trees and was interested in how many trees they actually were. So it was I think at the time it was maybe the million tree campaign. And he was saying I think it per billion tree campaign he was saying is this a lot of trees? How many trees are there growing or you're at the El forestry school? And he had this graph and Tom was really excited and he showed it to me and he said, We need to count all the trees. Look at this graph. I said, Tom, this graph just shows that big trees take up more space than little trees. You know, this is this is really dumb. And I think I think is really cool, I think is really exciting. And people are really gonna want to know about this and, and we spent about two days we would meet and have coffee and play games, and he would tell me how exciting this idea was and how we needed to do it. He needed a forester to and I finally just broke down and said, Fine, Tom, if you want to do this thing, then like, we'll need to gather a whole bunch of ground plots, source plot data, and then do remotely build a remotely sensed or geospatial model based on that and try and spread that inventory out and that's not necessarily my expertise, but that's definitely how I see people doing it and you know, we have some folks, Charlie got a goal, who was a wonderfully talented geospatial data scientist, was in the lab at the time and now actually runs the Center for the GIS interdisciplinary GIS center. It's good work. And I said it you know, Charlie can get us started on this if you really want to do it. And then, you know, we started gathering all this data, you know, I remember Tom saying, Do you think we could get 500 points or something and I forget how many we ended up with but it's 1000s and 1000s. And then we just started calling people emailing people. Do you have data? Do you have data? We built that big model, we got that estimate 3 trillion trees. Cover of Nature magazine, which is it's just crazy. It's crazy. And then I see it, you know, I have students take they're out in the field, do it cruising timber, and they take a picture of the inside of their Snapple bottle cap. It's on the inside of the snap bottle cap and it's in children's books that you know end up in my daughter's hands. And it's, I mean, it becomes this amazing thing off of we're playing games and drinking coffee.

Laura  
For amazing I love that story. And I love that someone was just like you go to the Yale School of Forestry Shouldn't you know how many trees there are?

Kristofer Covey  
I mean, that's, you know, I think you made that amazing point about like, not feeling like you belong. And that's completely true. It's been true for me my entire career. And I think one of the things that was really different for me between my undergraduate education, and then going through graduate school at a place like Yale is that when you walk into the door, a place like Yale, what they say to you is, you are here because you have done really cool things and you have the potential to do a lot more cool things and so what can you please tell us what you need from us, for you to achieve the next thing that you want to do? And you're on the team now, and we're on your team and we're behind you, and we're behind you because you are going to do great things and we believe in you. And I think that just sets the stage for young people to do and I wish someone had said that to me when I was 16 1519. And so I think that's one of the things that I brought away from that place to my teaching at Skidmore is to say to these young people, what is it you want to do and tell me why it's really cool so that I can help you do that really cool.

Laura  
thing? Yeah, that's really awesome. I mean, offering that support telling someone you believe in them is like, huge, as far as mentorship goes, and just helping somebody. You know, I've said that to somebody recently, and they're like, Why? Why don't I'm like, Well, let me tell you all the reasons why. I don't just throw that out lightly. You know, but it can make a lot of difference for someone and also, you know, I always tell people, when they're like, Oh, I got this job, or I'm doing this thing and I don't feel like you know, I belong or whatever. I'm not good enough. Like, you're there. So someone thought you could do the thing. So just do the thing. You know, like figure it out and do it. Yeah. You know, like we doubt ourselves before anybody else does,

Kristofer Covey  
you know, just no one can see no one can.

Nic  
Yeah, so okay. So many things.

Laura  
I know you're teaching at Skidmore. You love research. What do you do

Kristofer Covey  
now? Right now I'm almost completely consumed with the soil inventory

Unknown Speaker  
project. So

Kristofer Covey  
yeah, so after the tree counting paper, my dear friend, colleague of great, wonderful human, Charlie Benegal, and I were working on a research center at Yale that was with the High Plains Stewardship Initiative. And out of that, there was a doc and coming doctoral student who was really interested in soil carbon. We had all these ranchers out west that we work in and we were supposed to be doing science that was going to help land managers better manage lands in the American West, which again, comical, because we would go out, we don't know anything. And we would just say what can like, what do we do to help you? And they would say, Well, what is it that you do? And we would say, well, we're pretty we think we're pretty good at counting stuff. And they said, well, people are telling me I should be counting my soil carbon. They're telling me that I'm going to do better through droughts. They're telling me that I'm going to get access to some carbon market or that I'm going to be able to run more cattle. And I'm wondering if that's true. And so we set off we said, we'll just go get some ground source plot data and we'll build a remotely sense bottle. We'll be back to you in a few months. And of course, it's just not that easy. It's a tremendous challenge where you did not understand what we were getting ourselves into, which is also one of the wonderful things to do in life, right. Get out of skis for a hot second, but we ended up working for a while with a little open source pocket spectrometer and in the course of trying to feed that little cheap machine samples to parameterize these models with, I realized that a big part of the challenge is actually just getting geo located dirt and bag. We were spending a lot of money on hotel rooms, rental cars, conversations with ranchers about gate codes. And it was all about just getting to a spot and then spending a couple of minutes and putting the dirt in the back. And then you do that for a while and then you get back on the airplane and fly across country. It just doesn't. There's got to be a different way to do it. So we started to look at both accelerating the you know, making the sample collection more efficient in the field, but also finding ways so things like where do you take the sample and how many samples do you have to take? Let's try and really solve that problem. Then let's once you get to the spot, can we make it really quick? What's the fastest I can get a sample what do we need new hardware again, getting back to welding stops on drills and thinking about which kind of drill bit works in which kinds of soils and things like that. At a certain point in doing this. I was then I got this job at Skidmore and we got invited to go down to the Caney fork farm which is Al Gore has a farm down in Tennessee. He grew up on this farm. It loves this place. He's building his transition to regenerative agriculture and is really interested in demonstrating means team demonstrating that you know regenerative agriculture can be productive and financially sustainable and can pull carbon out of the atmosphere and put it into soils and
_______
Kristofer Covey  
their farm manager at the time Zach wolf said, hey, well how do we count this stuff? How do we really rigorously evaluate the outcomes from our regenerative management here? And I met a guy there named Bruno Bosco who runs a really high powered modeling lab out of Michigan State University is one of the leading agricultural modelers in the world. He builds these incredibly complex systems for predicting forward and backward agriculture through time has been a you know, sub field yield maps for every agricultural field in the world. We'll tincidunt really an amazing scientific enterprise. And I said, Wow, that would be really helpful. I've been thinking about how to get geo located dirt bag and if we could then scale our field observations using your models. He said you know your geo located during the back could be really helpful to me and parameterizing and verifying my models. And so we started this enterprise together and Mr. Gore was really excited that it was coming out of the thing we were doing together on his farm, and about the idea of the kind of feedback we were giving to his management team. That we could make that accessible to a lot more farmers and producers and there are a lot of reasons why having these data is really important for management, a lot of reasons why it's really important for markets, a lot of reasons why a not for profit needs to be building larger scale inventories that those can be compared against. And so we've been working on a suite of field hardware or technical sort of builds, or processes for moving samples through labs, mobile applications, web dashboards, and then integrating all of that into the models that Bruno is building, so that we can build a system where you don't have to get on an airplane. It's sort of a 23andme for soil, right? We send the kid out in the mail, the farmer, the rancher or a consultant, whoever does the inventory and we do automated sampling design on the app. And then afterwards, we scale those up and regional inventories. We hold those inventories as a nonprofit working in the public interest. Oh

Nic  
my gosh, that's very recently already super cool, really incredible thing you're working on. And like the whole time you're talking about this, I'm like, Okay, I need this to be complete because I want to I have a follow up for you. So like one of the things that we do, I'm thinking about, you know, I work in the consulting industry, right. So a lot of what we do is working with federal clients, governments to do very similar kinds of work really, in that applied setting. So one of the challenges we have, you know, the National wetlands inventory, very familiar at all with it. It is a you know, the nationwide database for wetlands, it is not a perfect database. I would say it is a very common way to put that. But you know, for example, this summer, I have 43 sites that I need to do sampling for wetlands inventories, and a lot of the time I'm dreaming of ways to do this as efficiently as possible. So it's not quite the same as like your soil inventory. But that's the kind of thing we were now I'm starting to think of an idea how do we do something similar like that with wetland

Kristofer Covey  
and that's such a critical data set that well and extend data set if you look at uncertainty, for instance, the global methane budget that is largely driven in in large part, I should say, driven by uncertainty in global wetland extent. And so starting to come up with a rapid way to quantify what you know and to map what is a wetland and what isn't and to sample that out would be and again, finding a way for all of this disparate data, there's lots of data out there, but how do we, you know, there's a great EO Wilson quote about how we're drowning in data and we're starving for knowledge and take that data and put it into information. That people can use. Yeah,

Nic  
it's a real challenge. Honestly, I think the kind of tease that out a little bit, it's basically there's already been a ton of wetland surveys all over the whole country in many different areas, and there is not a single place for them to go and some cases that can't be and I know we've we've actually talked to people who are trying to gather that information, but how do we solve a problem like that? How do we get all of this data in a central place that that works, you know, more efficiently than like wetlands, or

Kristofer Covey  
what I mean, I think these I'm about to sound like a radical socialist, very heavily centrist but I think the I say that jokingly, of course, but I think that these are the kinds of public goods that the government should be running and holding and developing. And I think we see a lot of funding for this kind of thing coming out of the IRA. And a lot of energy at the USDA and the NRCS to build these public resources and maintain them, or to provide the resources so that non governmental actors can step in and make that happen. We've seen a huge resource push and I think there's something like for instance, for soil carbon, I think there's $300 million in the IRA to start to build national scale data inventory repositories and modeling efforts to sort of be able to track that through time. Hopefully, hopefully, and I believe that there probably is a similar effort going on with wetlands. I know there there's a whole team within the global methane budget then Poulter at NASA, have a bunch of work in trying to better resolve these wetland extent layers that a lot of that is remote sensing and satellite kinds of observations, but that's really difficult. You know, rains unknown wetland moves on Yeah, right. Yeah.

Nic  
That's funny that you mentioned Ben, he was on the show. So yeah, for real. Well, to call him back and be like, Hey, tell me about this wetland stuff. Yeah.

Kristofer Covey  
He's such a fascinating guy. And oh, talk, talking about a brilliant guy. See, this is the thing that I'm talking I'm not been you know what I'm saying? I'm not been a Pulitzer but I bumped into somebody same thing. I'm just launching satellites.

Nic  
That sounds great. And you know, it's funny that I think one of the common threads we have on the show is people's experience in the field. And so we'd like to do a little mini segment here called Field Notes where we ask our guests about memorable moments in the field doing the work and yes, you already know where this is going. So please, do share with us a fun or memorable story of you.

Kristofer Covey  
I think, you know, one that always comes to mind when I forget. It's a reminder of the fragility of the human condition. Oh, yes, I on that. You know, the Bhutan research, just miracle into being something that was productive and work to help but, you know, when I first got there, I was looking for a field say, you know, I'm up at this research center in the mountains, drinking a lot of tea and eating biscuits and trying to figure out from people where I can go and get connected to this guy, but I've got to go from room Tom to Tim poo and meet him. So I get on this bus and I had been there for a while and I dedicated myself to, oh, I'm going to just eat all the hot peppers that they put at me and I'm going to eat food. So I'm going to be fine and of course, right and the bus stopped halfway. It's a day long bus ride and they stop halfway they make one stop and they had some road food as they call it. And then I got just that night. I got terrible. As as sick as I've ever been, and it was awful. And I Well, I'm going to die in this like hotel rooms by myself read either gonna find me the next day and then someone will call my wife and tell her that I had wrote food and I didn't think so. But I was up all night. It was it was terrible. It really as sick as I've ever been. But I had to meet this guy at 7am The next morning. So he pulls up his truck outside. And I sort of hobble into the backseat of his truck. And I said, Oh, you know, and he said, what's wrong? And I said, Well, I had road food. I'm not sick. It was it's food poisoning, but he was leaving the next day to go to Australia to do his PhD. And so this was my one time to go up in the mountains to get introduced to this site. So he's bringing me up and he has to make a series of stops to talk to villagers about erosion control methods. And so he's walking me out into the field with them. I'm sort of hobbling and then when we get to a stop, I'm just lying down in the grass and trying to keep it together. Right. And all of the locals are what is wrong with the job what what have you done to this job? And then he of course just says the two words road food, and then they explode laughing. Children should not eat road food. Why are you eating the road food and they're like the ad set and sort of like sort of rolling around moaning they're saying Oh, chill, don't eat the road food. Yeah, come on. And we managed to get through to the site, but it was, you know, that's about as low as you can get as a human is sort of in front of a group of other adults that you don't know, from another culture that you're trying to sort of present yourself as, oh, I'm I'm here and I have something to offer you. Ridiculous. And you're you can't even stop and have a roadside snack without shutting yourself down for 48 hours. Yeah, you live to tell Yeah.

Laura  
That's so funny. That's a good similar story. I'm not allowed to sell because I went to Cuba with a group of friends and I'm the only vegetarian and we had an experience where I was the only one who didn't get sick because they always

go bad.

Kristofer Covey  
I have noticed you know, it's interesting when you're traveling south Asia, it's a veg and non veg. So the default is that there's no meat in the food. Whereas we have it exactly opposite. There's food and then there's vegetarian food. The defaults are completely different.

Nic  
That's a pretty epic story. You have another one and you and you have another.

Kristofer Covey  
Yeah, a field story. Yeah, I mean, I think oh boy, Mark Bradford, who was the mentor who got me going on tree methane. I was in the woods with him one day and he was he was almost killed and that we were, we were out we were gathering coarse woody debris. And this was another one of those, you know, he needed chunks of fresh wood, which he was going to use for wood decomposition study, doing his you know, he was doing his super geeky thing that I barely understand now and certainly did not understand at the time. And I'm sure that if he were here, and we were both talking about it, you would realize that I don't understand it, and he he definitely does. But we had gone out in the woods and so I was there because he needed me to identify these trees to species and then use a chainsaw to put them on the ground. And then use a chainsaw to Section them into little pieces. And so my part of this project was essentially to locate these trees within the forest that we were allowed to fall that were going to give us the material that he needed to go forward with this study. And I think at some point, a random bandsaw and a chipper or something, you know, this is what I was supposed to do. But I had felled a fairly large tree, and it had fallen, everything was fine. It was laid out on the ground, and I think I was turning towards the next tree. We're a few minutes after that tree has hit the ground and marks up working in the canopy measuring chunks of wood and identifying areas where I'm going to make cuts and the tree fall must have let loose a snack. But it didn't happen when the tree fell. This is minutes later and a very large, very rotten, very wet beach snag fell over and it landed I would say within a foot of Mark and if this thing was maybe a 10 inches around Allagash fell where he was. And I think about a once in a while because you know a foot to the left or the foot to the right and I'm I'm making a phone call to tell Mark's wife that he's not coming back from the woods. Right. And we're joking. We're having such a great time. And we're, you know, and for what to get a little pieces of, you know, so that was a harrowing moment in the field for

Nic  
sure. Oh, gosh, yeah, it's I think we all have those moments. Right? Like I remember I'm doing my research with Fox turbos and I have this radio, you know, metal rod in my hands, you know, trying to find these turtles. And I'm like, a mile and a half into the forest, you know that I tracked in so there's no quick way out. And I get to the wetlands area so that now I'm in an open space, and suddenly storm and then lightning is starting to strike all over the place. And I'm trying to run through a wetland which you could imagine doesn't work. Now with this rod in my hands just trying to get underneath trees. You know, and you're just like, okay, all right. Wow.

Kristofer Covey  
Yeah, you get nervous. And it's it feels really good to be here to tell the story doesn't and it's really hard to convey the emotion of that moment to someone, but we all have our own right that wow another coin flips the other direction and it's pretty

Nic  
bad. Oh, I know. It's like if you can, you can feel static electricity in the air where you are it is not pleasant is not a pleasant experience. But yeah,

Laura  
because we all if you spend enough time in the field you've got a nervous or something, you know, immediate stuff, but then you also have like, whoa.

Kristofer Covey  
Sure. You know, I was just thinking that there was a there was a different one that I can't remember if we talked about before the I had taken students down to the the noble Research Center and Ardmore, Oklahoma. This is less less harrowing sort of a teaching moment in the field when we have gone out to do these prescribed burns, you know, which is really an amazing thing. You go down there and the students have kind of drip torch in their hand and they're, you know, burning 20 acres. Today, and that's really amazing. But the hosts they're tremendous hosts and they're these super knowledgeable guys, but for our students. This is the first time that they you know, they're at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. How much time do they spend in Oklahoma and pickup trucks? With large men with cowboy hats and belt buckles right it's a totally different world. They're going into it this youngster Sam he I think he seems a teacher now. They've had dinner and he's holding this coat can and he's looking for the recycling then he's sort of looking around logs and my my buddy down there Jeff says oh can I can I help you with something? He says, Yeah, I'm looking for the recycling. And just as Oh, yeah, let me let me take care of that. And he pulls the cans out of Sam's hand and he opens the lid to the garbage can he throws it in and he says we're single sort and look of terror on Sam's face that the idea is that this Ken would be thrown in the garbage. And he's trying to balance that with the fact that he's just spent the day in the woods, you know, with Jeff, and Jeff is brilliant, and knows everything about that landscape. He believes in climate change, right and he is a talented Land Steward and conservationist in that in the sort of Aldo Leopold legacy. And just to see him sort of say, oh, there are a bunch of different ways that people approach the environment and connect with it, that are about more than my identity as a northeastern liberal, you know, protectionist and your identity as a southern add in all of the things right. It's those kinds of experiences I think are really important those field experiences are important, not just about trees, but about connecting with other people in the field.

Nic  
That's a great point that sometimes we forget, you know that people have different experiences and come from different places and have different ideas. Some of them are good, and you never would have thought of them because of that. And it's a great great point too. And yeah, there's been plenty of moments. I think I can even think of being in a meeting. And the proponent asks everybody where we're from. And then he says, Good, you're all Southerners. I was like, wait, what does that mean? And he's like, a dumpster out back and I don't think he was kidding. You know what I mean? That's that's, that's how I choose to understand. Right, right. Yeah, very, very great. All right, Laura.

Laura  
Yeah, well, we're all I mean, we're out of time. For the most part. However, you had something in your bio and your bio, but our form we asked you ahead of time, like about moving rocks. Is that really just like, a real thing that you do? It's a real eye opener for

Kristofer Covey  
oh, it's a real it's a real thing that I do and it's, it's dumb, right? But it's what I like I'd like to do is most of my life or my professional life, my entire professional life is a it's on Zoom or it's talking to people in front of a classroom or giving a talk here or it's writing a paper or it's a meeting right, and I miss the more physical parts of being a human. And one of the things that I will do on weekends is move is move rocks. And as I've done that, I It's my favorite thing to do. If you know if my if my wonderful wife says to me, Hey, like Saturday you knew whatever you want to do, what is it like all take oral and we're going to be liking what do you want to do? I want to go and move some rocks and I've started trying to move bigger and bigger rocks, using my joke with my friends that we use only the wisdom of the ancients. And so like sleds, big stone boats and come alongs and levers to move these these rocks and and I think at a certain point, I realized you know, I'm moving really large things. And I'm, I'm in a place where it's really inconvenient to move them anywhere else. And I think it might be the most durable thing that I will ever do. My my science really is, you know, it's not whatever like it's some PDF and, you know, after our robot overlords remove our access to the internet, it will disappear and, you know, all of the other things that you do are pretty ephemeral, but I figured out that if you take a rock from a place of low utility, you know from the middle of the woods wherever side of the road and you move it to a place of high utility into a wall, a set of stairs I think stairs are really permanent. And if you do that, then they're likely stay. And particularly if you move the rock from up on a hill down a hill, I think this also makes your actions more durable. And so I have these conversations with myself and my head while I'm while I'm building these weird things off the road, but I would encourage everybody to move more rocks. I think it's good for you.

Laura  
That is so interesting. I think maybe you were like a pyramid builder in your past. Like I need to move some big rocks around.

Kristofer Covey  
Ricky Gervais has that great bit about how everybody's always done something really cool in a previous life. Right. Here we build our sounds right? Yeah, there

Laura  
we go. Awesome. Well, is there anything else you want to talk about before we let you go? I'm

Kristofer Covey  
just I'm excited to chat with chat with you guys more when we're done.

Laura  
Yeah, we're having more than we got. Um, and finally where can people get in touch with you? Yeah, I

Kristofer Covey  
hope folks will reach out to to like I'm on LinkedIn. Christopher Covey. All through the Yeah, yeah, that's right. Kr is to Fer, Christopher. Last Name Cody co DUI but check me out on LinkedIn. Come over to our website tcf.org. You can find me on the Skidmore page or email me there at Skidmore K covey@skidmore.edu.

Laura  
Awesome. Thanks so much for joining us.

Speaker 2  
Hey, thanks so much. And that's our show. Thank you, Chris, for joining us today. Please be sure to check us out. Each and every Friday. Don't forget to subscribe rate and review. See everybody

Transcribed by https://otter.ai