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Protecting Our Streams in Ski Country
Love to ski? Enjoying breezing down the powdery snow on a crisp winter day and then retreating to the lodge for a warming libation? Something that good must have a downside.and if you havent thought about whether the pristine mountain streams are degrading from accelerated population growth and poor land-use planning, we are lucky to have STAR fellow Kristin Gardner worrying for us. Protecting high-elevation, headwater streams is her mission. These streams are critical for habitat protection, and sediment, nutrient, and flood control downstream.
Kristin Gardner recently became the Executive Director of the Blue Water Task Force. She will complete her PhD at Montana State University later this year with help from an EPA Science to Achieve Results (STAR) fellowship.
Kristins research has taken her to the Big Sky resort in southwestern Montana where the resort community is undergoing expansion. Kristin is investigating how the location of buildings and seasonal influences of the ski resort and local community affect the water quality of the West Fork of the Gallatin River and its tributaries. Nitrogen is her particular interest. Excessive nitrogen from fertilizers and human waste move through the soil into streams and can cause algal blooms and fish kills as it concentrates downstream. By understanding the hydrologic flowpaths; i.e., how water flows in the subsurface and surface in a watershed, one can answer the question does it matter where a building is sited? The results of Kristins research will help managers make informed decisions on how to best develop land in these sensitive ecosystems.
Kristin has recently become the Executive Director of the Blue Water Task Force in Big Sky, Montana, a non-profit organization whose mission is to protect and preserve the health of the Gallatin River Watershed. http://www.bluewatertaskforce.org/ 
For more information about Kristins EPA STAR research:
http://cfpub.epa.gov/ncer_abstracts/index.cfm/fuseaction/display.abstractDetail/abstract/8222
For more information contact Kristin Gardner at: kristin.k.gardner@gmail.com
Her home page: http://bsi.montana.edu/gk12/book/export/html/53