The New Outreach Program at Tall Timbers
By Theron Terhune, Outreach Coordinator
The Outreach program, is the newest program addition to Tall Timbers. The program will provide added value to Tall Timbers' scientists, members, constituents, cooperating researchers, academics, and land managers, among others, through transferring knowledge learned from practical research conducted here at the station, and in the Red Hills region and greater Albany area, and putting that knowledge into the hands of the practitioners. By doing so, land managers and conservation planners will be better equipped to conserve and manage the landscape.
Whether it is prescribed fire or game bird management, Outreach and Education is by default woven into every program at Tall Timbers. As such, each leading scientist, in part, plays a critical role in its delivery. However, managing a quality research program is time-demanding, leaving little time for effective delivery of the wealth of valuable information produced from the innovative research being conducted by each program. Thus, a primary goal of the Outreach Program is to effectively deliver this valuable information, while employing novel methods to better interact with, and engage landowners, land managers, and conservation planners to promote exemplary land stewardship.
Outreach is by definition a systematic attempt to provide services beyond the conventional limits, and here at Tall Timbers it is the aim of the Outreach Program to apply this approach to habitat management, land conservation and exemplary land stewardship. Because of the small- and large-scale at which outreach is needed, this is both an exciting and daunting task. Fortunately, the advent of hand-held mobile devices and continual rapid advances in technology provides ample opportunity to accomplish this and effectively extend the collective knowledge learned about various ecological processes here at Tall Timbers to the broader conservation community at large. The Outreach Program is poised to tackle this challenge by using four primary conduits for effective delivery of practical management information:
