Under the umbrella of the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee, superintendents and supervisors from the eight regional forests and national parks, as well as leaders from local communities, got acquainted with the resources available at the U.S. Department of Energy's Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. As part of their quarterly meeting April 7 and 8, they spent two days touring the national lab in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and at the site in the Idaho desert.
The visit allowed participants of the GYCC to become familiar with the medley of expertise that INEEL has available. It also cultivated a cooperative relationship between the local government agencies that have to deal with similar issues such as regional transportation, infrastructure such as buildings, sewers, roads and electricity generation, and natural resource management.
"One of the functions of the GYCC is to coordinate decisions and manage data between agencies," said Henry Shovic, a soil scientist with Gallatin National Forest, Montana, who is assisting communications between the INEEL and the GYCC. "The GYCC supports projects across park boundaries, and now it's pulling in the INEEL."
For two days, INEEL scientists introduced the visitors to a variety of research projects. Some of the projects would be immediately useful to the parks and forests, such as work with bacterial resources that can be applied to microbial populations found in the park system, INEEL's fleet of alternate fuel buses and trucks and their management, or computerized information systems that can handle large amounts of data.
Shovic and the many other participants were exposed to quite a bit of INEEL research. He said, "We were very impressed with the quality and quantity of the science and technology being done there. Most of us did not know the scope of work INEEL engaged in."
Every national park and forest has a myriad of natural resources to take care
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Contact: Mary Beckman
beckmt@inel.gov
208-526-0061
DOE/Idaho National Laboratory
19-May-1999