Search This Blog

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Training Opportunities: Week of February 29, 2024

University of Maryland Extension - Wildlife Management

YouTube recordings of past workshops:

Land & Wildlife Speaker Series: Steve Bega & Steve Mars of Animex Wildlife Fencing

Delmarva Fire Ecology and Presctibed Fire Workshop



Playcore

Breaking Ground: Best Practices for Creating Accessible Routes and Surfacing in Parks and Recreation Facilities

Date: 03/06/2024 at 
Time: 2:00 PM (EST)
Method: Live Web Event 
Cost: Free

Equitable and safe access to parks and recreation facilities begins with firm, stable, and slip-resistant ground surface materials along accessible, connecting routes. Thoughtful planning ensures people who use mobility devices or other adaptive equipment can move independently from site arrival points and throughout each park, play, and recreation setting. This session will address requirements for exterior routes and surfaces in outdoor recreational settings and offer design considerations to go beyond minimum compliance to make certain everyone has the ability to participate. Accessibility Specialist, Bill Botten, will review best practices for planning accessible routes, sidewalks, shared-use paths, routes to and within recreation facilities including play areas, sports fields, outdoor recreation areas, trails, and beaches. This is the first session of a yearlong four-part Beyond the Minimums accessibility series. This webinar includes real-time captioning and video remote interpreting (VRI) upon request. To request video interpreting services and/or resources in an alternate format, please email core@playcore.com at least two weeks prior to the live webinar date. 

Describe the difference between accessible routes, sidewalks, pedestrian trails, circulation paths, and shared-use paths.

  • Explain at least two scoping and technical requirements for routes to and within recreation facilities including play areas, sports fields, outdoor recreation areas, trails, and beaches.
  • List three design considerations for accessible routes and surfaces that go beyond the minimum requirements of ADA to meet the needs of visitors of varying abilities.
  • Name tools and resources to support the planning process and help professionals advocate for inclusive design solutions specific to routes and surfacing.



Forest History Society

Black Pioneers in New York's Adirondack Wilderness: A 19th-Century Encounter - Amy Godine

Date: March 12th, 2024
Time: 1:00 PM Eastern
Cost: Free

Register Here

In 1846 and 1847, three thousand Black New Yorkers were gifted with 120,000 acres of Adirondack land by Gerrit Smith, an upstate abolitionist and heir to an immense land fortune. On their new land they could hope to meet the $250 property requirement New York imposed on Black prospective voters in 1821, and gain a cherished right of citizenship, the ballot. Smith’s suffrage-minded plan was endorsed by Frederick Douglass and New York’s leading Black abolitionists. 

Smith’s plan was prescient, anticipating Black suffrage reform, affirmative action, environmental distributive justice, and community-based racial equity more than a century before these were points of public policy. But when the response to Smith’s offer fell radically short of his high hopes, Smith’s zeal cooled. Timbuctoo, Freemen’s Home, Blacksville, and other Black enclaves were forgotten. Local and regional historians would marginalize the Black experience for 150 years.

In "The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier" (Cornell, November 2023),  author Amy Godine retrieves the robust story of Black pioneers who carved from the wilderness a future for their families and their civic rights, and returns these trailblazers and their descendants to their rightful place in the Adirondack narrative. 

Amy Godine is a writer, curator, and lecturer with a longstanding interest in the social history of the Adirondack region. Since 1980 she has lived in Saratoga Springs with her husband, several modestly productive fruit trees, way too many record albums, and an old, soulful dog.  



Natural History Society of Maryland

The Natural History Society of Maryland is a private nonprofit dedicated to conserving Maryland’s natural heritage and educating its citizens on the natural sciences since 1929. We are a volunteer-run organization with a few part-time staff. We manage a small museum in Baltimore County where we offer programs, lectures, workshops, and courses on a wide variety of natural science subjects. The lower level of our building is a collections facility that houses over 200,000 natural history specimens and artifacts.

Upcoming Programs in March:

Evolution of the Appalachian Mountains

Date: March 7, 2024
Time: 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Cost: $5.00 suggested donation

Stretching approximately 2,000 miles from the southern states above Florida up into parts of Newfoundland, the Appalachian Mountains are culturally, ecologically, and geologically rich. Although they’re named after the Native American Apalachee people, the geologic history of the Appalachians goes even further back. The hills were growing and changing long before the first hunter-gatherer groups inhabited the area 16,000 years ago. These mountains are part of an even larger belt as far as northernmost Norway and Greenland and have undergone numerous tectonic events. In this talk we will explore the tectonic making of the Appalachian Mountains, from their origins over a billion years ago to their modern post Ice Age setting.

Date: March 28, 2024
Time: 9:30am - 12:30pm
Cost: $15.00

There’s recycling that we all know: cans, glass, and paper. But how do you recycle the uncommon, like a tree?  When your recycling can sits on the curb, those empty pop cans and frozen dinner trays inside disappear.  But is it that easy with a tree? Here’s your chance to see the technology that goes into recycling at the Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) in Cockeysville and the Camp Small wood lot and sawmill in Baltimore.

Date: March 22, 2024
Time: 10am - 3:30pm
Cost: $45.00

Bury yourself into Baltimore’s history with walking tours of two unique cemeteries, Westminster Hall and Burying Ground and the Green Mount Cemetery.

Date: March 10, 2024
Time: 2pm - 3:30pm
Cost: $12.00

Maryland is home to 17 types of turtles. Of those, 12 species are threatened by habitat loss, and 9 are experiencing population decline. All four sea turtle species found in Maryland are protected by the Endangered Species Act. In this presentation, you’ll learn how to tell turtles apart, and you’ll learn about dangers that turtles face, about native species and habitats, and about common non-natives in the state. Of course, no presentation on turtles would be complete without live turtles.

Tiny Travelers: Saw-whet Owls of Maryland (with Melissa Boyle Acuti)

Date: March 28, 2024
Time: 7pm - 8pm
Cost: $5.00 suggested donation

Did you know that Maryland’s smallest owl, the northern saw-whet owl, weighs less than a bar of soap, yet travels thousands of miles over its lifetime? Each fall, these tiny travelers pass through Maryland during their annual migrations. Scientists are now learning much more about the northern saw-whet owl as part of Project Owlnet. Once thought to be a rare species in Maryland, we now know more about these tiny owls and their populations through years of bird banding data.


No comments:

Post a Comment