Measuring Hurricane Helene’s legacy in Appalachian streams

We are the center for Aquatic Technology Transfer, a collaborative sort of entity that exists between Virginia Tech and the United States Forest Service. So a lot of our work this year is focused on research post Hurricane Helene, seeing how it affected the waterways, species that live in the waterways in general, land around there. Basically, what a team will do is they will get to a creek on the Forest Service. They will walk the whole length of the creek.They will take data on habitat units they see. And those are things such as pools, riffles and runs within a creek.They look at things like waterfalls, cascades, things that could be natural barriers 1.5 across. After we get this data, we're going to send it to the natural resource managers and they're going to decide what sort of projects need to be implemented into the forest. It's important because a lot of people want to know where the stream is going with the storm having brought in so much water. It overtopped a lot of its regular banks and now flows in different areas. We're trying to see if it did that here in this area, or if it's more concentrated in the harder hit area, such as South Carolina or North Carolina. I lived in Asheville when the hurricane hit. It was really devastating. I saw communities like have to change their whole lives because they no longer had homes. So it's really important to me to like help as many people. And the Forest Service manages so much land, so it's important that they consider the people as well. We've had lots of great reactions and responses and conversations with people in these communities that we drive through. We're hoping we can kind of demystify, you know, the research side of things a little bit for these people and sort of deliver them common sense answers and really break down what we're doing and how it's going to help them.