North Dakota Forest Service Grant Opportunities

All right, and we're back to the short take with North Dakota Forest Service grant opportunities with Craig and Matt. I am going to turn it over to It sounds like Matt lost the bet. So, he is going first and uh you should I will stop sharing and then you should be able to share. All right. So, is everything showing well on your end, Lindy? >> Yes, we're good to go. >> Excellent. So, as Lindy said, my name is Matt Olsen. I'm with the North Dakota Forest Service. I serve as the forest stewardship manager. Um, based out of the Lisbon field office, our entire staff for forest stewardship. Um, totals four people. It's myself and then three other specialists we have located in different offices across the state. Um, and I just wanted to really give you kind of an overview of a lot of the stuff that uh we work with as far as programs available for land owners um that could be an asset for those folks in your guys's counties. So the first program that's really been a huge workload for us since it it came into inception about 2015 is the windbreak renovation initiative. This has been an ongoing grant that we've done that's been available through the outdoor heritage fund. Uh right now we are on our third, fourth and fifth iteration of windbreak renovation. Um, unlike other grants, uh, with renovation, removing and planting trees back on the ground, it takes quite a bit of time for that stuff to get in the ground and get completed. So, it usually takes about four or five years to get through a complete grant round with it. So, um, and what is it? Um, basically it helps land owners with 75% of cash expenses once project is complete. um it differs a little bit in that way. I know that there are egg producers that would be eligible for the same practice. It's offered through EQUIP. Um the nice thing about our program is is that it's available for those folks who are non not not registered through the local USDA office. Um, even though a lot of the folks that we go out to, it can be chickens, horses, cows, or just rural a rural residents in general. Um, and it's designed to kind of address deteriorated windbreaks. And we we do have some caveats for what we have to report on. um those key resource concerns that uh the outdoor heritage fund wanted us working on is you know protecting acres of crop land um rural residences and roads. That's kind of how we quantify our reportables through this grant. Um some of the core practices that we use for helping folks renovate those windbreaks that are deteriorated. Um, and the key example I always think of, you know, those windbreaks that have um, Dutch elm disease where you see those just kind of taking out some of those windbreaks and then putting them back in. Um, if it's a smaller windbreak, we've seen ones where we do a complete remove everything and put back on the ground if it's pretty far. But generally we want to do it kind of in a phased approach where we take half leave half so that we kind of leave some something there for the existing cover while those new trees get a little bit bigger. Um sometimes we see where the windbreak is kind of just starting to fail and people don't want to lose any of that cover. You know I think of western North Dakota as a prime example. um you know it is tough and it takes a long time to get tall get your trees to a height where they're working. So even though they might not be the prettiest, sometimes dead and dying trees are are better than no trees. So sometimes we'll use supplemental rows um just adding a couple rows on the edge to to beef that windbreak up maybe before we start working on renovating some of that area. Um then another c practice that we use that probably doesn't get used as much as it should um is compassing. Um this is one of those practices. It's basically cutting back your your shrubs and letting them regrow. Um it's kind of a a shame sometime to remove something that's just going to get put back in there. I think of carrageana and some of those tough soils. It's like, well, we're just going to be removing these and putting them back in there. So, why not take advantage of those good healthy roots that are already out there by doing copsing treatment. Um, so just kind of a walk through of how the process works. Um, you know, we get a request from the a site visit request from a land owner. Um, this comes from a variety of ways. Um, we've had districts that actually will enter that in for people uh when they come into the office and are interested in it. Uh, we have people that'll find our website and request it organically. Um, extension. There's just a lot of folks that kind of help get the word out about um what we do for windbreaks. So, that site visit gets requested. Uh we go on site, visit with the land owner, um see what their goals are, what ideas they have, um resources, you know, what are they able to do, what they need to hire out, um and then we come up with what we call a practice plan draft, send that out to the landowner, um and say, "Hey, you know, here's kind of what we saw. Here's some ideas that we have. Um what are your thoughts? Uh and that's kind of where we put it back to the landowner. At that point in time, it's kind of we've done our site visit and then they need to decide, you know, if they want to start moving forward with an application. Um items that we need for an application. Um, bids for removal work is a big thing and it can be one of the harder things to get um, just because it's limited in some areas. We have done extensive work on building out a database of contractors that do work and what counties they're willing to go into. Um, and I believe we've sent that out to all the districts um [clears throat] through the employees association, but we do have that as a resource for those folks. Um, we will need a cost estimate from the soil conservation district and a finalized tree plan and renovation map just so we have a good idea of what's going to what's going to take place before we um award a contract. Um, so our applications are batched at the end of March and September every year. That's kind of the cycle we are on. Um, it used to be it's gone anywhere from an open signup when it first started to monthly. Um, then it went to once a year and now we're kind of settled into that twice a year and it's working pretty well. So, um, that's probably going to be where we're going to stay for a while. Um, success successful applicants, we're usually contracting those folks within 2 weeks of batching our applications. So, you know, we get done all applications in September 30th. You know, we're trying to rank those October 1st or 2nd as fast as we can. um just so we can get a firm grasp on and get people started with their project. The only thing that can, you know, take a little bit of time is, you know, for that two weeks is if people are unsure, um, not sure if they want to do it, if there's any feedback that comes back after ranking, and then cultural resources, but our culture resources, the Shipo staff has been great for getting those back to us pretty efficiently. you know, it's a lot easier process than some of the other programs where we just send them a batch of, you know, roughly 30 to 40 applications instead of some of them like the tree planting initiative where it's hundreds of them. So, they get through ours pretty quickly. uh a big I'm not a big all caps guy, but this is one that I I consistently has been a message that we try to tell everybody as many times as we possibly can. Uh any work that starts prior to contracting is not eligible. Inevitably, every spring or summer, I get calls going, you know, I've started this project, you know, it's almost done now. We're going to Can I get car share? Uh, no. I mean, even those folks that just request a site visit, they go, "Well, I requested the site visit, so I'm I'm good to go with program, right?" It's like, "No, we we need to be on site. We need to come up with an application and contract." H. [snorts] So then we get through, everything happens, the project gets completed, we go back on site, do a check out, landowner then submits invoices and proof of payment. um big things that you know I know some of the districts we've been reaching out um some we have to get those uh final tree plans um as installed and then sometimes we just reach out for those invoices directly with um soil conservation district staff if the landowner submits one and it's got a balance on it they have to provide those checks to correspond to that invoice if we get a zero balance invoice from the district then that satisfies that proof of payment. So uh that really helps us and helps the land owners if we can kind of bypass getting some of those excess documents required for payment. Um then we submit the payment and to NDSU and then it gets processed through at the end. It is all one lump sum. So we don't you don't remove the trees and get paid for that and then plant the trees and get paid for that. So uh it can be um a bit of an excessive burden on some land owners to try to carry that cost through. So some of what we can't do um just kind of to clarify some of those you know renovation without a resource concern and some good examples of that would be you know abandoned farmsteads you know going back to that reportable where it's a a rural residence you know I realize people have a farmstead they want to move out there sometime but they're just not sure when. Uh I know the best time to plant a tree was yesterday and better better times today, but uh we just cannot commit, you know, state grant funds to something that's not actually a priority yet. And and same with kind of that CRP side of things, you know, we're going off of protecting crop land, you know, and I know technically crop land CRP is considered crop land acres, but there's no cash crop out there to protect. Um, similar to like the tree planting initiative, I think we cannot fund projects in those residential developments. Um, and that's getting to be a tougher one as we're seeing the sprawl from some of those bigger cities. Um, it's kind of humbling to see some of those developments that are creeping out 10 15 miles outside of those hub cities. Um, project needs to be with the land with the land owner. um we can't do a contract with the renter or anything like that because it does have uh 10-year agreement attached to it. Um new windbreaks um if you're just moving out into the country blank slate and looking to plant a windbreak around a new farmstead, you know, that is not where our program is really designed to fit in. that's we're trying to be complimentary to a lot of other programs out there like like the tree planting initiative and some of those other ones instead of duplicative. Um so we we don't do that. Now, if we do see an area on a farmstead where, you know, there's a gap or there was no protection on the south, you know, sometimes we'll add that in as we're working on some of those areas, but um just trying to avoid um duplicative practices and grants. So, we do have a $1,000 minimum and then a $50,000 maximum reimbursement. Um it takes a lot of time and effort to process these people these projects all the way through. Um so that's why we have the minimum the maximum. It takes a lot of funds to do some of these series of field windbreaks or larger farmstead windbreaks. And you know we've only been requesting $900,000 for our 3.0 4.0 5.0 um just to keep a manageable workload. Um, so we want to make sure that we're we're spreading those funds around and if we start doing, you know, $100,000 projects, um, you can only do nine projects across the state. So, we're we put the maximum in there to try to spread that out a little bit. Uh, another big one that we get a lot of questions on is, well, you know, if I could I take out all my field windbreaks and then just move those in and around my farmstead. Um, you know, that's not a great model for uh what we're trying to do with this program. So, we try to keep the windbreaks with the ones that we're renovating. It's not a tree mitigation program where I can take these trees and move them over to here. Um, it's it's a renovation program. We're trying to keep that same same purpose of those windbreaks intact through the renovation. Uh, doesn't mean that we can't do some redesigns. um you know, taking some of those single rows and maybe making a that run through the field and maybe prioritizing those along the north and west edges to protect from primary winds. Um so there is some opportunity to tweak it, but we can't just take a piece here and and move it over to a different piece. Um, you know, every I kind of jokingly say it's been a calamity of a year every year since I've come on. Um, some of the folks in the southeast probably remember, you know, a winter of 2024, we got that freezing rain that really hammered a lot of um, the trees and had a lot of breakage and and created a lot and that created a large amount of interest, I would say, kind of along that Lamore, Dicki, uh, Ransom, Sergeant, Richland country. Um then we got into um 2025 or no 2023 was the storm. 2024 we had the wildfires up in the northwest part of the state where we worked with quite a few people up in that Williams and Divide country. Um just throwing out options to them thoughts. And then we last year was the summer of the tornado and wind damage. Um Stzman, Barnes, Cass, Trail, Steel, uh pretty big band of those where even if you weren't in the ransom was in the even if you weren't in, you know, the path of any of those tornadoes, the the winds were terrible and there's a stretch that you go through that's pretty rough looking up that way. So, it is not a disaster program, but it does definitely those definitely areas when those things happen definitely turn into hot spots of where we're going to look at stuff pretty frequently over the year. Um, do you mind I I can open it up for any questions now on Wii if we want to or I can go through all of the programs and then just do the questions at the end of that. whichever way people want to go with. >> Just a quick question, Matt. What's the best way for an SEDD who's never worked with you before to um get you in touch with maybe some land owners that might be interested and how they can support your process? >> Good question, and we'll get to this one at the end. One of the big things that I want to do when we get through all these resources is just take everybody on a walk through our website. Um there's a lot of great information on there. It's just been recently revamped. So, um it's it's pretty good. So, we'll we'll touch on that a little bit later. Okay. Well, we'll go into the forest stewardship tax law program then. Um, this one is a little bit different of a program. You know, we always think of grant programs, cost share payments, all of that stuff. Uh, this is actually written into North Dakota Century Code, our tax law program. Um, it has there are other states as well that this is adopted. So, it's not absolutely unheard of. Um, so through this program, landowners receive a 50% or 50 cent rate for their taxes for their county on forested acres enrolled in the program. [sighs and gasps] Um, the agreement lasts for 5 years and then initially and then can be reenrolled after that. Um, some of the kind of restrictions people ask, well, what what do I have to do? It's no destructive practices. So, like cutting down your trees and putting a shop out there, grazing it, doing anything along those lines. But otherwise, um, you know, pretty pretty loose, easy program to get along with. Just kind of let the forest do its thing and you get the tax credit. Um, it must be adopted by the county commission and currently we have seven counties enrolled throughout northeast North Dakota. Um, there's a list of them there at the bottom. Benson, Grand Forks, Nelson, Pemina, Ramsey, Walsh, and Wells. Um, a few of these counties are pretty low enrollments. You know, we get into Benson, Nelson, Ramsay, and Wells. Um those are mostly some of the bigger windbreaks that we see enrolled in the program. Um but then you get into counties like Grand Forks, um Pemina and and Walsh where you've got some of the riparian areas, some gorge some of the Pemma gorge going through there. That's where we really see a lot of acres enrolled. So, how does Forest Stewardship Tax Law Program work? Um, if all of the county courouses, I send them every year a county of our application. Uh, we do also have it available online or the land owners can reach out to me [clears throat] directly and I can get them an application, work on getting that filled in. We do a site visit to make sure that it meets the the goals of the program. Like we just talked about, if you see cows out there, that's not really meeting the the goals. Um there also, as we see, there's some minimum requirements um for planted forest, i.e. windbreaks, things along that nature. They must be greater than 60 ft wide and at least 5 acres in size. contiguous. Um, for our native forest acres, they must be at least 10 acres. So, you can combine the planted and the native forest, but that also has to be 10 acres. So, um, anytime you include the some of that native, you hit those requirements. Um and then at the end of the year we verify everything account for everything and then we send a annual report to all the counties of the people enrolled in the program locations names and then they receive that tax credit for the next 5 years. So I did want to you know I gave this presentation Paula I believe saw it at our forest advisory council. You know we always think that ah forests are aren't at as big of a threat. So I did do some time lapse of some of the projects that these are actual ones that were enrolled in our FSTL program. Um, and you see this nice kind of contiguous forested acres running through the crop land here. You start to see, you know, oh, maybe I can kind of cut through that area and gain a little bit back. And here you see kind of how that gets completely disconnected. So, um, that's kind of one of those examples of, well, it just kind of happens slowly over time. Um, here's one from 2024. Uh, on the left, you see kind of a nice block of forest over there. Nice block to the right. Um, and that's how fast in one year all of that can be removed, piled up, ready to burn. This one is probably one of the rougher ones to see. Um, you know, that's right along the Red River there. You see nice forested acres kind of trickling through there with crap on either side. They took that whole part off and returned it to or trying to return it to crop production. I am curious with burning that stuff out there, how long it'll take for that soil to come back to actually being able to go back to actually producing a crop versus uh those burn scars. So those those threats are are real and they are out there. So, it's nice that there's some programs, you know, one other program that we've just kind of piloted lately, um, well, it got we presented to the Outdoor Heritage Fund, uh, North Dakota Forest Service and North Dakota Game and Fish Department, um, through our our talks on the Turtle Mountain Working Group where we did have um, Jody, I believe your predecessor, Paula, worked heavily on kind of that plan for getting something, you know, looking at the Turtle Mountains and prioritizing workload up there. Um, out of that came the idea for this program. Uh, and I'm atrocious. We're terrible at naming long names. The Private Forest Improvement Protection Program, or as I like to call it, um, so this was um, we just rolled it out this year. We had a nice kickoff meeting up in Botnau June 9th at the Dakota College up there. Um kind of trying to target some of those prime land owners uh along the along the highway up there in Rolette and Botnau County. Uh program's really designed to do two things. Uh protect the forest. It comes with a a 20year stewardship agreement. Similarly saying you're not going to do anything to negatively impact those forested acres. Uh it's got improvement of aspen which is important for us. We actually built in uh 10% of the acres enrolled will be you know we'll have management done which would be some patch clear cutting trying to knock that aspen back so it's not so old and decadent like myself and it's young and in good shape and lots of it and then also provide access through the game and fish plots program. [snorts] Um, so far we've had pretty good success with it just in the limited amount of outreach that we've done with it. Um, right now we're reviewing applications for about 800 acres with over 700 acres interested in doing the plots access. Um, we've already gone through the apps. It's now it's kind of just working with we're in the process of working with those land owners on some of those fine details and hopefully everybody agrees to but you never know. We also that's I don't count my chickens until they hatch either. So I don't believe it's a contract until the ink signs. So, but it's been encouraging so far and it's great that we're actually doing something for, you know, a huge chunk of our forested acres in North Dakota. So, like I said, it's a 20-year agreement. Our stewardship payment, the stewardship payment's $25 per acre per year. So that ends up being $500 per acre as an upfront payment. Um they do have the SkinFish has a little bit of flexibility where they can kind of split that straddle that payment between two years. So it's not such a touch such a bad tax hit. Um 10% of the acres going to be improved. You know, the nice thing about those folks going into plots is they get a 100% cost share provided for that. Whereas landowners who do not provide access is just it's 75%. And then those folks who take that plot additional plots, they get $10 per acre per year. Kind of that $200 works out to that $200 per acre upfront payment as well on those acres. So, um it it can be it's a substantial commitment with 20 years and um committing to doing some improvement out there, but it also provides enough incentive where we feel like we kind of hit a good spot where we don't want it to be um too good where everybody enrolls, but we want to provide those incentives for those people who are committed to doing good things in the Turtle Mountains. And then for those acres that aren't forested, you know, of the wetlands, the meadows, things like that, um there's also opportunity to bring those into plots as well and get additional payments through that. Um, just wanted to touch on something and I'll get the web page up as Craig talks and have I'll be able to do a tutorial at the end, but um, forest health resources. Um, I know I just had one district this week call me and go, you know, I got somebody brought here's a stick with, you know, dead curled leaves. You know, what what's going on with my tree? Um, and I know that happens a lot as I sat in those offices. So, this is a nice form that's available. It allows land owners to go out, take pictures, and send that stuff directly to our forest health staff. They can take a look at it, kind of get some initial thoughts, and go on site if needed to follow up for more more information. Um unfortunately we're just seeing um more and more tree diseases as time seems to be going on. You know emerald ashbor uh we're finally kind of seeing that hit outside of areas that we're expecting um with the most recent one in Cass County. Um pine pine disease has now been documented in North Dakota. Um so you know I've already gotten a couple calls. see what I've got scotch pine, I got dead one. Um, so just being able to put those folks out there and give the information. And then also for the forest health guy people, they can definitely peel through some of that. It asks, you know, are you watering? Are you applying pesticides? Because if anybody's ever heard Joe Zelelesnik, uh, one of the most common reasons for sick trees is, um, poisoning by by pesticides, unfortunately. So, um, I will key that up and we'll kind of walk through some of those resources after Craig got gets done, but I just wanted to w touch on that a little bit right now that it's not just forest stewardship. Um, there's other things we didn't have Martin, our forest health manager on, so I always like to give a shout out for some of those folks. Um, and here is our forest stewardship staff. Like I said, Cody Clemenson, he is at um on campus at Dakota College of Botnau. Kind of covers that northern tier out to the west. Um both myself and Jameson Vulk, we're based out of the Lisbon field office. Um we've got Jared Baron up in Walhalla. He kind of is in the core of our FSTL land. Um we do have we have had a position out in the western part of the state and are looking at um bringing that position back, but with um some of the budget cuts, it hasn't quite come to fruition yet. But I'm still hopeful as that one would really help fill in kind of the fill in the last empty block in the stage. So with that, I will see if I can stop sharing now. >> Thank you so much. Yeah, feel free to put the link in the chat and Craig, we can get you up and going while you're getting up and going and sharing. U Matt, we did have a question on so you talked about a few different programs >> which I assume um the question was did you say anything that about a limit of number of projects per year which usually there's a certain number of funding and depends on how many projects you get and how much funding you have but do you have anything to add to that? >> Yeah, you can't just do five different $50,000 projects for a landowner. it is just one $50,000 project per sign up. Now, if they want to, you know, stagger that over, you know, I always try to encourage folks to when they're staggering applications, you know, let's start that next one when the following project ends. Uh just because of the having to have that cash out of pocket for that long. Um, it's nice to get paid before you start paying out more. Um, [clears throat] but there's that's the only restriction is is just one $50,000 project per sign up. If they they want to have more than that out, they certainly can. But >> do you usually um do you usually have quite a is it pretty competitive where you usually have quite a few applications? Like your allocations every year are kind of consistent. So yeah, generally interest exceeds funding available. Um, so we do have a ranking criteria that we use to kind of priorit to provide some sort of criteria for putting the best projects on the ground. >> Thank you. All right, Craig, we'll turn it over to you >> there. I better unmute myself. Do [snorts] you do you see the slideshow? >> Yep, we're good. >> Yeah. All right. So, I'm Craig Ling and I'm with the uh community forestry department. And you know, Matt deals with more of the private land owners and you know, rural people, whereas community forestry uh we deal with public resources, communities, parks, um schools, things like that. So, it may not be relevant to all you, but I know a lot of times people reach out to soil conservation districts and have questions and I'll kind of show you what programs we have that are available for the public. So, we have five staff. Um, I'm located in NDSU here in Fargo along with Grace Idol. Uh, we have Joel Allen and Beth Pesky who are located in Bismar office and Noah Schaefer who's our volunteer partnership coordinator is in Lisbon. So, we're spread a little bit throughout the state, but we still have a long travels when we go to that northwestern part of the state. [clears throat] This kind of just shows where we've been in 2026. Uh, we've hit most of the counties in the state. I know I haven't put a couple in there. I've been in a few communities in Richland County. I got to add those. So, we do get out to communities when requested and do site visits. So, we're talking about grants and I figured I'd give you overview of what we've done in the past. So, in 2025, we had two different grant applications um pro in the spring and the fall and we had 84 communities submit applications and 58 of those projects were funded and we gave out about awarded about a million dollars. And in the spring of 2026 here, we had 42 applications and we funded 37 of those for almost half a million dollars. And here's [clears throat] where the grants were funded in the spring or awarded. So they were spread throughout the state, too. More in the eastern part, but we do quite a bit of work out west, too. So the grants that we have, that's probably the part you're interested in. >> [clears throat] >> We had the emerald ashbor mitigation grant and this was a state of North Dakota appropriated $950,000 to assist communities of EAB. All $950,000 was um given to communities for grants. The grant projects were a $25,000 maximum grant award. Uh there's a 20% match required which was cash or kind and it was for removal of ash and replacement minimum one to one. uh they could plant more two to one to get more points then and things like that. But the the goal of this was to get rid of some of those poor or critical condition ash and replace them with a new variety of trees. So when EAB gets there, you know, it's been found north Mapleton, Fargo, by Edgely. [clears throat] It's in other areas, too. We just haven't found it yet, I'm sure. So that's a big thing for community forestry just like it is for uh the rural communities with the field windbreaks and the the farmstead shelter belts cuz communities unfortunately this is a tree inventory tool and I'm going to talk about this just a little bit more after we go over the grants. But this is Buffalo, North Dakota and as you can see it's 76% of the public trees are green ash. So Buffalo is not very far from where EAB has been found. So hopefully we can work with communities like this to cuz they're not going to be afford to treat all the trees and they're not going to be afford to remove all the trees. So if we can get started in getting rid of some of those poor condition, critical condition trees and replacing them with a better variety, that's that's our ultimate goal with this grant. We also have a rural canopy improvement grant and this is a federal grant. It's a $10,000 maximum grant award. There's no match required with this one and it's for communities with population less than 2500. So it's not for the bigger communities, for the small rural communities. And if they do remove trees, they have to replace them minimum of one to one also. This grant will be available. Our next grant signup's going to be in spring of 2027. This one will be available. The EAB we have encumbered all that money, but we're asking for more. So hopefully we'll have that again in 2027. So we'll have this grant and then we also have America the Beautiful grant. That's another federal grant. That's a $5,000 maximum grant award for next spring. This one requires a 50% match. Can be cash rain kind again. And it's just going to be a tree planting grant. So it's going to be adding new trees to the communities. And then we also have a community family forest grant which will be available in the spring. Also, this is a state grant and it's $1,500 maximum award, but if the community is a Tree City USA, they can get 2,000 and there is a 20% match. It's cash or in kind. And this is the grant we like to start with with communities just, you know, plant five, six, seven trees. Um, get them started with the grant process so we can go there. Uh, we do workshops, which I'll talk about, but go help them plant trees to plant them properly so they're successful. And as you can see in these pictures, we don't really plant the soil conservation grade stock in communities. We're we're going for the bigger trees, the inch, inch and a half caliber trees, potted typically, but we do have communities that plant bigger 5 to 6 foot inch caliber um big trees, too. So, like I said, we do workshops. Uh when I got here, the trees are always planted too deep. the tops are you you'll notice trees are planted too deep when the tops start dying on them and the trees still alive and typically just decline over time. So our goal is to get out to communities that have never planted trees to show them how to properly plant them, how to find that root flare, how to get that right depth, how to break that root, you know, their pots, how to break that root ball apart. Uh so that's that's been a very successful program. We also after communities have grants or even if they don't have grants, we do pruning workshops. So a couple typically a couple years after a grant is the trees are planted, we'll go back to community and ask them if they want a pruning clinic and we'll show them how to properly prune those trees so they get good structure. We also do Dutch elm disease which is still relevant out west and emerald ashbor identification and then tree species ID. Arbor Day is a big thing for community forestry. Uh we had 54 cities um celebrate Arbor Day that were Tree City USA last year. And we also had our first ever tree campus K through 12 certification. So good thing about Arbor Day is a lot of times the kids are involved. So we get out there and kids get to plant trees, get their hands dirty. Sometimes it's just city staff. Uh here's Maddock. They're the first Tree City USA uh first tree campus K through 12 in North Dakota. So, just this last year, we're trying to get out the schools more and get them more involved with this program. So, tree inventory, that's that's what I was talking about earlier, that that Buffalo, North Dakota, and it's a cool tool, and I'm going to show you a little bit of that here, too. Uh, basically, we go out to a community if they request it and do their tree inventory. It's just public trees. Again, we don't go in people's yards. We just do the boulevard trees and the parks, sometimes the schools. And we have over 140 communities that are have the tree inventory. And here's a map of the communities that we have a tree inventory. And so I I'm going to show you the website basically, but when you go to the tree inventory, anybody can access this information. All these dots are basically trees that we inventory. And it'll tell you if it's the common name, the Latin name, the diameter, breast height, that's how big around the tree is. and the condition of the tree at the time of the at the time of the uh inventory. So, and the other thing I'm going to show you here is the recommended trees for North Dakota. This is a new handout that you might find um helpful. It's it shows which trees are recommended for North Dakota. And unfortunately, you know, it's a whole state, so sometimes you still have to work with a community that trees in the southeast part of the state might not grow in northwest part of the state. So, I'm going to show you the tree inventory here. I'm going to slide this over. So, this is our website. And I know Matt's going to bring this up. I'll just show a couple things that I was going to go over and and show, but the >> I'm still seeing your presentation. Craig, you're going to have to stop yet. >> Oh, so I got to stop sharing. I can just slide it over. Okay. I'm going to try this again because this is a pretty neat little tool. Let's see here. This over here. This is a little different like Matt said in Teams. [laughter] All right. Can you see it now? >> Yes. >> Okay. So, this is the tree inventory tool. This is on our website, North Dakota Forest Service. You can find it on there. So, if you go to your tree inventory, this this shows you can either go in here and click on the community if you know where it's at, or you can scroll down here. So, I'm just going to scroll down to my home, Mary, Henson, and all the trees come up. So you can scroll into the park and you can just click on a tree and it shows it's a spruce. But if you want more details, you can see how big a spruce it is and what condition it is in. So it's a pretty cool tool. The other thing you can do is get stats for the community. So you can, you know, you can everybody can go in and look at this stuff. you just [clears throat] use the hub stats charts and then you can go like tree diversity and you can see that hankinson has now 41% frainous species or 45 45% green ash if you look at that thing but um so you can get different charts to see you know ideally you don't want more than 10 to 15% of a species in a community so they won't want to plant any more maples and hankinson and they don't of course don't want anymore we don't plant ash anymore So they can up the lynons and the hackberries and the honeyloust and the elms in in town. So it's a very cool tool to use. The other thing, let's see here. I'll go back and Matt was going to show this, I know, but I'll go the recommended trees for North Dakota. You can go in there and it's got alphabetical order. So if you want to see what kind of elms are recommended, it goes here and it it shows the elms that are recommended or you can go to each species however you want to do. You go back to the top and you can see manurian alders. It's it's by alphabetical order. So if you want to see um service berries, um spruce, which spruce are recommended for North Dakota, it these are all kind of cool tools to see. We're kind of running out of time, so I'm going to stop and then see if there's any questions. [clears throat] >> Um, the community grants, does that have to be within the city limits? For example, we have a cemetery that's just on the edge of Carrington, but I think it's not within the city limits. It's got to be a publiclyowned. It It would have to be a publicly owned cemetery. It doesn't have to be technically and we have funded projects that are publicly publicly owned that are not in city limits before. So, so it it it's possible it would be eligible. And where can the handout that you the new handout you just showed, where can that be download? I didn't see it on the on the website of recommended trees. >> Yeah, the the document unfortunately we just put it on there a while ago and they're trying to figure out how we can get it for the community can download it. But as of now, if you want to want it, I can you can email me and I can send you the document to a secured transfer file so it fits in an email and you then you can open it. [clears throat] So yeah, there is a big push for digital accessibility for PDF documents. So that is where part of the issue of where we've kind of run into making that more public. Not not impossible, but it takes some work to get some of that stuff figured out. Um I'll just go ahead and take a quick look through here our web. Like Craig said, I know we're running out of time, but um if anything, I would just say if you just Google is it showing up? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So, if you just Google NDFS, this is the link it'll take it to. I always just I was a big fan of just bookmarking things. So, um just throw that bookmark in there. And we are a very towered agency where we have a lot of as we can talk about different staff. Um so we have our town nursery. That's where you'd find any information um related to that. I know that we're working on getting our our new uh our new booklet for that out. I think with an October date as Craig had talked about under community forestry showed you where the recommended trees um the tip tool and some of those programs information is located. Fire management um I won't click through click through that one because I that's more for probably a lot of fire departments. Um forest stewardship. Um, so if you're looking for, you know, a person comes into the office and wants to, um, has interest in a WRI, you can click right here and request this on-site visit and it'll take you to our landing page where you just enter in the information for them and it and hit submit and it's done. Easy peasy. um not land owners if they're looking for help with doing removal work. This pulls it up where you can just select your county. Go to Adams County. Here's the list of folks that are interested in working in Adams County. Um [snorts] tax law. Here's the application for enrollment. Information about the century code. Um, more information on the Tur Mountain Landscape for Stewardship Plan. And then the staff directory at the bottom. The other one I touched on was Forest Health. If somebody comes in and like you said, hands you that branch or says, "I got a sick tree. Can you come look at it?" Here you go. Do you have a sick tree? Um, go in here, click on that, and you can do this from a smartphone as well with this link. Basically, put in the address, name, where's it located in all that information, and then hit submit. And that goes directly to our forest health folks [sighs] looking for some EAB information. There's a lot more plugged in under here. Dutch elm disease, pine wel nematode. Um, you know, there's just a lot of information available that I don't think people are aware of. So, it's a a very good this is a good landing page to bookmark. So that's [sighs] I will stop there and turn it back over to Lindy. >> Thank you so much. That was great. Um it is 10:29. So if you guys have any questions um feel free to put them in the chat or you can unmute. Um I probably am going to stop the recording so we can keep this um under the hour. Um, but we will stay on and we appreciate you all guys all um, everybody being on this call today and have a great rest of your week. But feel free to stay on if you have any questions. Oh, and let me put up the the post poll too. We do love our feedback. Um, it helps us make sure that our short takes are actually of interest to the people who are joining them. So any feedback you have for us, uh we we really appreciate. Um and if there's any topics you want us to cover in that number five question, uh please let us know there too.