M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust
Three people working in an Idaho waterway.

“A desire to understand the relationship between fires and waterways led College of Idaho professor, Dr. Jaime Goode, to apply for and receive a $48,000 grant from the Murdock Trust last year. With funding in hand, Goode and her team set out to see if Idaho rivers would have the right types of fine sediment needed for salmon to spawn, were it not for the fires…
“We look at what’s happening to the complexity of [salmon] habitat—do they have places to feed, places to rest, what are the water flows like, what are the nutrients in the water like?” Goode said.
After a full day of work, the researchers would trek back to base camp exhausted and hungry. And every night after dinner, each had to discuss the most challenging, fun, boring, annoying and interesting aspects of the day.
“Some of the most challenging parts were walking around the rivers and getting over wood jams,” Goode said. “The most fun was looking at all the different bugs, and the most interesting was seeing these systems and how well they appeared to fit into our hypotheses.”
While helping Dr. Goode, Dacic and Maude also conducted their own research. Dacic collected sediment samples in order to measure in-stream carbon storage at the different sites, while Maude collected bugs to see the variability in food resources for salmon. They’ll present their findings at the annual Murdock College Science Research Conference Nov. 4-5 in Spokane, Wash.”

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