Displaying items by tag: va tech department of fish and wildlife conservation

In May, researchers assessed the damage to a road and the stream than flowed within the culverts that resulted from flooding caused by Hurricane Helene. Colin Krause/USDA Forest Service.

Survey work will span Southern Appalachian forests devastated by historic 2024 hurricane, floods

BLACKSBURG — Virginia Tech and its Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service Southern Research Station, received an $8.8 million grant to address environmental impacts from Hurricane Helene in the Southern Appalachians.

The initiative will be carried out through the Center for Aquatic Technology Transfer, a Forest Service office in Blacksburg that focuses on aquatic ecosystem science and management in national forests.

Virginia Tech will lead the human resources component, hiring and training technicians and crew leaders to conduct fieldwork. With the ability to call on current graduate students as well as connections to alumni with experience conducting analysis in a forest environment, the university can rapidly contract 20 employees to form teams and begin critical data collection in early 2026.

The benefit to the university comes in the experience students receive in providing this vital field research.