That's WY: Stream Restoration in the Cowboy State
Lara Gertsch
Wyoming Game and Fish Department
Buffalo, WY
The Wyoming Game and Fish Department is tasked with providing the public the best wildlife and fisheries resource possible. During this presentation, we will discuss how we accomplish this in a place with so little water but so much land. State biologist are required to think like a beaver, rancher, game manager, historian, geologist, engineer, construction foreman, heavy equipment operator, accountant, diplomat, and horticulturist. How do we make the hard choices between passive and “yellow iron” restoration projects? How do we balance between what is best for the fishery and what is best for the stream? How do we navigate public and private resource management practices? How do we convince constituents to plant more willows and kill more elk? How do we maintain a vision for the future when we are asked to make it look like the past? The process, that allows the biologist to play all these roles and traverse all these paradoxes, includes assessments and reassessment to insure we are moving into the future.
About Lara Gertsch
Lara is a 29-year employee with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department where she currently serves as the Assistant Aquatic Habitat Program Manager. She spent her first 7 years with the Department as a contract biologist starting as a seasonal fisheries technician and moving up to a year-round elk disease biologist. She was a regional habitat biologist for 15 years in the Jackson Hole area. There she worked to protect and restore landscapes, watersheds, and stream channels. The last 6 years she has spent supervising the regional Aquatic Habitat Biologist across the state. Lara assist these and other biologist with federal permitting, project planning, implementation and setting priorities. Lara was raised on a ranch in Ten Sleep Wyoming and received a BS degree from Washington State University in Natural Resource Science.
Lara, is living back in Ten Sleep, with her husband, and teenage daughter. When not working she is helping on the family ranch and enjoys volunteering in the community that raised her.