Anna McEntire. File photo.
LOGAN — Managing director of the Janet Quinney Lawson Institute for Land, Water and Air at USU, Anna McEntire returned to KVNU’s For the People program on Monday.
She said the more individuals they have looking into and researching the latest science when it comes to Utah resources, the better they can inform state lawmakers. She cited the Bonneville Salt Flats.
“You just look in the Salt Lake Tribune from this week, they’re running a story about the Bonneville Salt Flats, and how they have spent a huge amount of time and effort and money trying to stop. It’s not just the Great Salt Lake that’s shrinking, the Bonneville Salt Flats are shrinking as well. For the past 30 years they’ve been working on a management plan that they believed would be beneficial for the Salt Flats, and new science, because they’re doing studies to better understand the way the water tables work, the way that water flows in the area, they think that they might need to be doing an about face,” McEntire said.
And they would have to completely overhaul their management plan for that.
McEntire said there have been many ways over the past few years that the Institute has been working to collaborate locally and it’s payed off when it comes to showing lawmakers what’s going on with local resources.
“The Logan River Observatory is one of those great resources we have at the university that helps us to understand the water that we have above surface, and now we also need to understand the groundwater that we have in the valley as well.
And finding ways to be able to measure our available water in the valley, is going to be able to help us understand what we have, what we need, what we can work with. Certainty on those things always makes everything so much easier to talk about.”
McEntire said one of the things they are working on for spring is making the long-running Spring Run-off Conference research more publicly accessible.
“And one of the things that we’re doing is we’re working with Northern Utah Water Users Conference to hold a combined and shared conference. So rather than them doing their thing at the (Cache County)fairgrounds, and us doing our thing up on campus, we’re going to have a two-day conference. Half down at the fairgrounds, half up at the USU campus where we are going to….we are combining registration, we are making registration free. So, for anyone who wants to show up it will be taken care of.”
The first day will be March 26th, she said at the end of that day, they will have a research poster session at the Cache Fairgrounds where water researchers will share posters of the work that they’re doing. There will be a reception and food and the next day will be up on campus.