Hasib Khan

John ITW For Transcription John: [00:00:00] My name’s John. I’m a Regional Extension Climate Specialist with Climate Impacts Research Consortium at Oregon State University. [00:00:08] Yeah. So, my name’s John. I’m a Regional Extension Climate Specialist based at Oregon State University, and I work on the Pacific Northwest Climate Research Impacts Consortium. [00:00:20] My name’s John. I’m a Regional Extension Climate Specialist based at Oregon State University, working with the Pacific Northwest Climate Impacts Research Consortium. [00:00:30] Yeah. So, my role with RISA is really to serve as an Extension Specialist the way our university extension programs have operated, really, for the last 100 years, but in that climate capacity. And what that really means is really trying to engage communities across the Pacific Northwest and bring to bear a lot of the science we have in these university centers, and begin planning for the climate and climate changes they’re going to be experiencing, really, in the next several decades. [00:01:02] So, my name’s John. I’m a Regional Extension Climate Specialist based at Oregon State University, and I work with a group called the Pacific Northwest Climate Impacts Research Consortium. [00:01:12] Sure. My name’s John. I’m a Regional Extension Climate Specialist, and I work with a group called the Pacific Northwest Climate Impacts Research Consortium. [00:01:21] Yeah. So, my role with RISA is to really act, in a lot of ways, as the community liaison for the Pacific Northwest CIRC program, as we call ourselves. And so, what that really means is acting in that traditional extension capacity and really trying to bridge a lot of the science that we have with the community needs. And, in this case, when we think about climate, it’s really about planning for future climate change. [00:01:46] Yeah. So, the Big Wood Basin is a really interesting place. Like a lot of watersheds in the Western United States, it’s very dependent on snowpack for its primary source of water. Otherwise, it really doesn’t get much precipitation throughout much of the year, and certainly in the summertime when water demands are greatest. [00:02:06] The southern end of the basin is, like a lot of other places in southern Idaho on the Snake Plain in the Western United States, it’s a very agricultural dominated economy, and so you have a lot of farming activities with different cropping systems that are all very dependent on that snowpack and melting snowpack to irrigate their crops during the summer. [00:02:28] As you move up into the northern basin, it becomes more mountainous, which is where most of that snowpack builds, and a lot of the towns there are very much based on a recreational and tourism economy. [00:02:40] And so, you have towns like Ketchum and Sun Valley that really rely quite heavily on tourism during the wintertime for skiing, as well as summertime activities, you know, fishing and hunting, mountain biking. [00:02:54] And so, in a lot of ways, the Big Wood represents kind of this dichotomy that we see in a lot of the western towns, of traditional farming but this growing outdoor economy, as well.