Hi, I would like to begin today's event with a land acknowledgement. The Archeological Research Facility is located in Huchin, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Chuchenyo-speaking Aloni peoples. Accessors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County acknowledge that this land remains of great importance to the Aloni people and that the art community inherits a history of archaeological scholarship that has disturbed Aloni ancestors and erased living Aloni people from the present and future of this land and is therefore our collective responsibility to critically transform our archaeological inheritance in support of Aloni sovereignty and to hold the University of California accountable to the needs of all American Indian and indigenous peoples. With that, we'll begin our event today. Welcome everyone. We have a special guest today, Clark Knight. It's going to be speaking and Dave Wall from Geography will be introducing her. Take it away, Dave. Alright, thanks, Nico. Yeah, it's my pleasure to introduce today's speaker, Clark Knight. Clark is a postdoc researcher at USGS in Menlo Park and she's interested in forest responses to climate change, both past and present. She's primarily worked in California's mixed conifer forests where disturbance regimes and particularly wildfire are driving community composition and ecosystem system function. She's a recent graduate from UC Berkeley's PhD program in environmental science where she leveraged reconstruction techniques from paleoecology to compare modern forests to those from the late Holocene and Euro-American settlement and an important aspect of this work is as we'll hear about today was considering and integrating traditional ecological knowledge with paleoproxy data to really enhance our interpretive capabilities. And as I said, she's currently a postdoc at USGS. She's focused on producing well-dated high resolution reconstructions of past climate to understand climate variability and its impacts on local ecosystems in Western North America, with a particular focus on extreme hydrological events like atmospheric rivers. And so with that, I will turn it over to Clark. Great, thank you so much for that really lovely introduction, Dave. I'm excited to be here with you all and to talk about some of the research that I did while a Berkeley student. Hopefully you can see this when we play from start. Looks good. OK, thank you. Great. So as Dave mentioned, I am a postdoc at USGS. Dave is my advisor and I'm going to be presenting some work that I did as a PhD student at Berkeley, specifically looking at the historical role of fire in the Klamath Mountains, California. We're going to be going through the history of this area as well as the land use history and trying to take a holistic look at what has been happening in this area. I consider myself a paleo ecosystem scientist. So I am really interested in all aspects of the environment and how they change through time. And so this is a picture actually of the Trinity Alps up in this area. But it has a really beautiful lake highlighted in this photo, which I'm going to be talking a lot about lakes and the paleo ecological information that can be harnessed from them. So I just want to plant that seed now. So in this area, if you're not familiar, it's in the Northwestern part of California and it's called the Klamath-Siskew Bioregion. It also intersects with Six Rivers National Forest. This is a really gorgeous area up in Northern California. It has a lot of mountainous topography. As you can see from the photo on the right has a lot of water, hence Six Rivers in the name. And really importantly from a paleo ecological standpoint is it has a lot of small lakes and these are lakes that have been formed from glacier retreat as well as landslides. And there's almost 100 of these small lakes up in this area. So it's a very great area to do this kind of work. And from a floristic standpoint, this bioregion is really, really cool. It has the most endemic conifer species outside of the tropics. So that's a really interesting feature of this landscape. There's actually a place called Miracle Mile that has 18 endemic conifers. If you have a chance to go up and see them and if you're interested in trees, it's a great place to go look at them. And the geology of the area is also really interesting. There are serpentine rocks. This is an example from when I was doing field work up there. And this area is historically speaking has had a pretty different fire regime from what we think about in terms of Southern California. So this might be some review, but I think it's really important to highlight this dichotomy in California with the different fire regimes because that's played such a huge role in constructing the conditions of these forests. So in Northern California and in the Sierra Nevada, by and large, traditionally, there would be fire regimes of high frequency and low severity. So there would be fires pretty frequently in the area, but they wouldn't kill that many trees and the trees are involved to cope with this recurrent fire on the landscape. And in general, in the South, we have a different fire regime where we have more time between fires or lower frequency, but they're usually much higher severity. So for example, we have a vast Chaparral landscape in California. It's particularly in the South that has crown fire and is burned completely high mortality. It's a high mortality event when that occurs. So just to kind of get that into your mind, because we're going to see a big deviation in the fire regime, particularly where I worked and the impact that that has had on the landscape. I'm actually able to quantify some of that impact of changes in the fire regime. And so before I get too far deep into my research, I think it's really important to ground this research in an understanding of some of the traditional ecological knowledge and publications that have come out of this area. And we know from the oral histories published by many people in this area that there has been a history of forest stewardship. And that has included things like cultural burning for ceremonial purposes or for clearing trails for crop cultivation. A lot of different reasons why fire has been put on this landscape. In particular, where I worked this map from the native land project has a really nice representation of some of these boundaries of the traditional territory of some of these tribes. So up in this area where I worked, I was really at the boundary between the Uroch tribe and the Karuk. And in fact, some of my lakesites were a joint use between the two of them. And some of them were purely in Karuk traditional territory. So there's actually a lot of tribes in this area, as you can see from this map, but where my sites were located was really at this intersection of the Uroch and the Karuk. And I think it's important to make note that a lot of these practices are ongoing to this day. This is not something that's just relegated to the past. And this is a really nice example from one of my collaborators, Dr. Frank Blake, from one of his recent publications. This shows a nice picture of a prescribed cultural burn of bear grass going on in this landscape. OK. So. OK, so with California Forest, one of the reasons I was really attracted to working in a landscape like this is that these forests are vast. They take up something like thirty three million acres of California's landscape. And they're really valuable. We like to recreate in them. And they also perform a lot of ecosystem services for us. You know, they store carbon, which is a huge part of California's climate mitigation goals is to keep California Forest as carbon sinks rather than carbon sources. And so they have a lot of dimensions to how we interact and use these forests. But I think a lot of what my work is showing is that the forest looked a lot different in the past than they do today. And in fact, our forests are very threatened. So the integrity of our forest is being threatened by a couple of main drivers, the biggest of which is mega wildfire, as we're probably all familiar with, as well as hot drought. And this is just an image of what was happening in September of last year. And I'm sure that this will continue this year as well. So these mega fires are basically taking out huge areas of forest, causing really high mortality and, in fact, probably leading to type conversion in a lot of these previously forested areas. And so why did this occur? Well, a lot of it has to do with fire suppression, which was a mandated federal and state policy used to prevent fires or quickly extinguish them once they started. And when people think of fire suppression actually began around 1905, when the forest reserve system was created. But it's a lot more than just putting out fire. It was actually the creation of infrastructure. So the roads to get to remote places in California, the setup of ranger stations, personnel, equipment, all of these things really coal lasting California to be very, very active and effective at suppressing fire for nearly an entire century. And this also led to public communication campaigns. As you're probably aware, Smokey the Bear, which did a lot to get in the minds of the public about fire being a negative force on the landscape. And so just to give a kind of review of some of the conditions that I am thinking about when I when I talk about these historical landscapes. I'm sorry, I hope you can't see this like other beeping thing that's happening on my computer. But with pre suppression forests, the Nature Conservancy has put out a lot of really nice graphics about this. And I want you to think of the forest before suppression as much more open than they are today, much more park like. So if you were to stand in a forest in the 1800s, you would probably have high visibility around you could see 300 meters away. And these conditions really were evolved to handle the fire that was coming out to this landscape in a very frequent recurrent way.  But they wouldn't kill everything. You would still have many healthy many trees survive and it would produce this healthier forest forested landscape. But when you have fire suppression for at least 100 years, as you get really dense overstocked forest like this, which allows any fire that then comes through to climb up through the trees, burn everything pretty much and you get this moonscape of a high mortality environment where there is no more forest anymore. And this is creating a really big problem for California because the state is using carbon in the forest as part of their climate mitigation strategy. And we can't combat climate change of all that carbon in the forest is just rereleased to the atmosphere. So these are some images I took near my field sites. You can see just how dense this landscape is. And actually, a fire had gone through relatively recently when I was doing field work and you can see, you know, just everything was killed. And these really high mortality post fire events are just undoing a lot of the good that has been done with carbon storage in our forests. So this really gave me the motivation for my PhD research, which I'm going to now get into, which is I wanted to understand are there any long term data sets? Can I even create a data set that's long term about forest biomass and fire to help us get an evidence base for the management decisions that we need to be making in California? Because a big part of California is restoration. But restoration to what? What can we quantify anything we want to get back to in terms of historic forest conditions, which are thought to be these more stable and healthy and resilient forested systems? So that's what motivated me to work on this. And it led me to this really fabulous field called paleo ecology, which I'm now obsessed with. And paleo ecology does exactly that. It allows you to study past ecosystem processes and in particular, I've been interested in the last 3,000 years or so of California forest in this area. And, you know, I use a lot of different methods to reconstruct what this area might have looked like. I'm going to go through the main ones. You know, the biggest one probably being pollen. If there's anyone in here that's familiar with that, it's a really powerful technique to reconstruct vegetation, particularly around lakesites, which is where we got our pollen from as well as charcoal from those lake sediments, fire scars from tree stump tree stumps and then taking that kind of empirical foundation and combining it with, you know, the really vast and deep and helpful ecological traditional ecological knowledge from our partners at the Karuk and Yurok tribes was became this really powerful narrative for what was happening on this landscape. And I also am going to talk a little bit about the historical inventories and management data sets that are available for this landscape that, again, really informed our understanding in a quantitative way what was happening. So I'm going to actually talk a little bit about the paleo and the pollen side because I think it's, you know, really interesting and also allow you to understand what I did a bit better. So pollen is a really powerful tool, like I mentioned, because it acts basically as a time machine. It helps you understand what was happening in the past. And the way it does that is that pollen grains, individual pollen grains are unique, typically for a genera of taxa, sometimes down to the species level. But it allows you to look under a microscope at a pollen grain and determine what taxa it came from. And so you can start classifying those pollen grains. As you can see, they come in different shapes and sizes. And it allows you to build up this assemblage of taxa on a landscape. And hopefully this video will play. But we are in the spring season, which is big time allergy season. And you can see just how much pollen comes off of one conifer tree, one conifer species here. It's, you know, trillions and trillions of grains of pollen. And if you now imagine an entire landscape that has trees on it, is just the sheer abundance of pollen on a landscape is vast. Most of our atmosphere has pollen in it. And what typically happens is that the pollen's purpose is to, of course, pollinate another tree. But what happens is it usually fails. It usually does not pollinate anything at all. And in fact, it ends up in other places like the gutter or the top of your car or in many cases on the surface of a lake, which is really valuable for us paleoacologists. This is where we want it to go. So this is a nice example here from Crater Lake up in Oregon. And you can see the green pollen swirling on the surface of this lake. I really like this photo because it shows the dynamics of the currents and it also kind of suggests the fact that the pollen will be mixed a lot in this lake and then will slowly actually percolate down through the water and become incorporated into the sediments of those lakes, which can then be cored by scientists. So that's the process basically of how pollen gets into lakes and why it's valuable. So for my own research, we went and got lake cores from seven different lakes up in this area. This is a nice example of one of our lake sites. You can see here mud and then this blue clay layer transitioning into other mud. And this was exactly what we were hoping to get. We got all these lake sediment cores. It was a really fun experience as well. And I looked at the pollen in these lake cores and that helped reconstruct the vegetation. So again, the lake sites that I worked in are these blue squares here and there's been some other work as I mentioned because there's so many lakes up in this area from existing paper. So I kind of knew growing in a little bit about the paleoepological history and that really helped when I was doing my work. So from the pollen record, basically what I learned from this was that the vast majority of the pollen from these lake cores came from only a couple of different taxa and specifically pine pollen. So this looks like this Mickey Mouse shape here on the right as well as Douglas fir, which looks like this broken Pac-Man and then this tan oak pollen. These are as well as other kinds of oaks but these were some of the dominant taxa on the landscape. And what I wanted to do was reconstruct this pollen history from these taken together with some work from done by Jeff Crawford. Some of his data is look at how this changed in the last 3000 years. So this is one example at our lake, a lake called Lake Agurantok. And we found that there was a 3000 year peak or high in shade tolerant taxa, likely due to fire suppression based on what we counted from the pollen. So we can see here the 20th century in this little red bracket and we have 3000 years of data shown here on the y-axis. And then we have our different taxa ranked by how intolerant or tolerant they are to shade which is a proxy for how fire repellent they are. So for example, Quirkus is very shade intolerant. So it's not gonna grow in shady environments. It needs fire usually to keep that shade down to keep other competition down. And what we found is this really big spike in things like Pseudosugos or Doug fir which is a more shade tolerant species and Nothylithocarpus as well, TCT and even an AB so fir. And that was true on the landscape for most of these species. So there's a signal of increased amount of vegetation on this landscape which I'm going to get to as well as in the pollen signal giving us this longer term view of what's been happening that there's been this spike here in shade tolerant species. Okay, so I'm gonna quickly talk about charcoal. I think it's just an interesting way of looking at past fire events. What charcoal is is it's incompletely combusted organic matter. It's also found in these lake sediment cores. The difference between macroscopic and microscopic isn't super important, but there is data about the macroscopic charcoal from this area. And charcoal gets into a lake in a somewhat similar way as pollen does. There's a fire event, it creates charcoal and it's either lofted into the air and it's deposited into a lake or over time there's surface runoff. So if you get a lake core and sample it you're gonna charcoal in this area because there has been a lot of fire. It's a high-frequent fire system. So when we look at another one of our lake sites, so this is Fish Lake up in this area is we can get kind of a qualitative interpretation of what's going on using charcoal accumulation rates which is the amount of particles per centimeter square per year. And I have plotted here our Z scores of charcoal so it's standardized and we have increasing amounts of charcoal going up decreasing amounts of charcoal going down on our Y axis and it's plotted over 3000 years. And what I think is interesting just purely from a qualitative standpoint is we actually have a peak we have increasing charcoal through the little ice age and the little ice age is a period where we have cooler and water climate not a time period that you would necessarily assume with increased fire. So that was pretty intriguing. And we looked at one of our other lake sites as well like Agarom talk with this kind of data. And again, a similar story where we have increasing and even actually a peak at this lake of charcoal through the little ice age. So it's been increasing through time and it peaks in the little ice age and then it drops off drastically in the 21st century which would be on the very right hand side of this graph near minus a hundred. So in calibrated years BP. So again, you see potentially the influence of fire suppression as a reason for this big drop but this has been really intriguing to us why there was so much accumulation during the little ice age. And we tried to look at this quantitatively and what we did is we thought about what our expectations would be if climate alone was what was driving fire on this landscape. So for example, if you have only climatically driven vegetation change if you had a hotter and drier climate like for example what we have today you probably see more fire on the landscape because fuels are dried out and if there's therefore a fire it's more likely to burn and that would lead to forest opening and the promotion of shade intolerant taxes such as oak.  But what if you wanted to try to detect an anthropogenic impact? So if you have human cause vegetation change it's not just climate alone. In a cooler and wetter climate you might actually expect to see more fire on the landscape that promotes more forest opening and more shade intolerant taxa. And this is actually what we see in our data set. So in the little ice age which is really the period for which we can test this the best which lasted through the middle ages 1300 through about 18 or excuse me after the middle ages 1300 through 1850 AD we see this exact trend. So we looked at it quantitatively we did correlations between charcoal, the PDSI which is a polymer drought severity index it's a measure of how dry the landscape was as well as vegetation openness or closeness. And what we found was significant and positive correlations between the amount of charcoal in the landscape so more fire and how open that vegetation was it would became more open. And this was happening during this period in the little ice age right around this period of about 500 to 100 calibrated years BP. This goes against a pure climatic alone expectation of this landscape. So we thought that this was a really nice finding for our data set. It also occurred at Lake Agarom talk I'm just not going to show that graph but we found the same significant and positive correlations. So we wanted to understand a little bit more detail about this fire on the landscape. And so we turned to fire scars which if you're not familiar they are caused by fires that burned at low intensity that injured the bark cells of a tree but to not actually kill that tree. And so much like tree rings can be dated and cross dated with other trees in an area fire scars can also be dated and cross dated.  It's actually a very conservative measure of fire in a landscape. So whenever you look at a fire scar record I like to think that there's probably more fire happening but it's just not been detected for various reasons which I'd be happy to talk about. You know, it's interested in the methodology. So again at our two lake sites Fish Lake and Lake Agarom talk is we had these various fire scar sites shown here in red. And they were kind of opportunistically taken where there were stumps of trees but allowed us to build up this nice data set right around these two lake sites. And we focused on these two lake sites because they were in areas of cultural importance to both the Yurok and the Karuk. So Fish Lake is in an area of joint use between the Karuk and the Yurok whereas Lake Agarom talk is a sacred lake site for the Karuk. So we're really interested in trying to reconstruct the fire around these two specific lakes. And what we found is that there was really frequent fire. So this is what the graphic looks like when you count the fire scars. There's a lot of different tree species that we looked at but what I really want you to focus on here is the composite here at the bottom which shows with each of these lines a fire event. And so you can see there was a lot of really frequent fire between the 1700s and the 1900s and then it completely drops off after 1900 when we know fire suppression was happening. And this was true for both of our lake sites. And in fact, when you calculate the median fire return intervals as you see really frequent fires about every seven years at Fish Lake and about every 12 years at Lake Agarom talk. And this work was really led by Dr. Eric Knaps I want to give him full credit for this. We also found interestingly that most of the fire scars were present in the latewood or the dormant wood of the tree ring. We think that this is potentially really interesting although we need to do more research about the fire scar ecology in this specific region of California. But it's kind of tantalizing because a lot of the cultural fire that was being put on the landscape, the indigenous ignitions were occurring in the late fall and early spring according to oral histories and current practitioners in this area from the tribes whereas lightning fire was typically occurring earlier in June and July. So the fact that those scars are kind of aligning with when we might expect indigenous ignitions is just a really tantalizing though inconclusive point from this fire scar study. And so, this came up a lot in my work and I started to form some views about this about the paleocology side and the native stewardship. And I really settled on this idea and view that I know is echoed in many other papers that have some nice reading material and examples at the bottom here about, it's really important to talk to, listen and learn from the people who have lived in the area since time immemorial and particularly in paleoecological research because they are implicated in your findings. And so for our sake, we were really curious about the role that they had in influencing the past ecosystem. And we talked to members of the crew in the Iraq and included them on our publications to understand what the forest stewardship was like. And in particular, we ask questions like, what is the relationship between human ignitions and natural processes, natural or lightning ignitions? And how can we best detect these native actions in the paleo record? Again, coming back to this idea of we wanna choose lakes that are culturally significant and we know that they were around and using so that we have the best possible chance of detecting those actions. And it also is important for the interpretation of the data sets. So in terms of getting really scientifically sound, robust findings, you gotta talk to people who know the area, especially when there's implications for today's management actions. And so as part of this process, we did what's called a practicing pick yaw, which in the Karuk language, that means to fix or to repair. And what was really lucky for me is that being a Berkeley grad student is I had access to the Karuk UC Berkeley Collaborative. And as part of this collaborative, they have set up tribal policy to do a practicing pick yaw before any kind of research collaboration begins. And so through this practicing pick yaw, I was able to develop a project with mentors who had worked with the Karuk before members of the Karuk Triber on my research committee. And I presented my proposal to the council and they decided to approve my research and I went forward. But what's really powerful about this policy is that it gives you mutually agreed upon expectations for the collaboration, as well as protects traditional intellectual property. It's really helpful during the review process because we went through tribal review. So everyone who wanted to be a part of the project was able to give feedback. It informed our research design. It informed the presentation of our results. So it was really a powerful process for producing a scientific product. So I'm really proud and happy about our collaboration there. And I want to contrast this with some other work that's come out in a paleo environment because it's been contentious in the field, actually this role of indigenous fire in the landscape. You may be familiar with this paper last year from Nature that says emphatically in their paper that the charcoal and pollen data and archeological record do not support the interpretation of significant indigenous impact. And they actually make some conservation recommendations based on this finding that there should not be fire in the landscape today. They should instead do chainsaws, cattle and sheep grazing and hay production. So this is exactly what I'm talking about, the significance of indigenous fire may or may not be on the landscape has real conservation impacts. And so what was interesting about this work is that they did not consult or talk to any of the tribes in this area, actually in the area in New England where they worked there was something like 21 different tribes. And so this really raised a flag to me and this is a controversial area but I really think talking to people and bringing them on board would potentially give you a different result. But this has been controversial in California as well, not just New England. So for example, a couple of different papers have published on this and said that burning activities, for example, in Whitlock at all, burning activities from native people are unknown and probably limited. I'm not sure how you get from unknown to probably limited. I don't think you can draw that connection necessarily. And then there was a whole book about it published by Vale in 2002 that basically says there's no, not been significant change on the landscape and not been significant landscape modification with fire before colonization. So my findings are in stark contrast to this but I wanted you to put out there that there has been other findings or in other publications about this controversial topic. And there's been pushback as well. So more recently in the literature, Leonard at all, Armstrong at all have raised questions and I think I've been asking as well of, how do you, why weren't indigenous scholars included or consulted, what relevant or historical history was or was not included? And then also this point about the spatial scale of what was reconstructed. That's a really important point when you talk about what can be done from the paleo ecological side is a lot of what you're doing is really constrained to a certain lake or a group of lakes. And so how much can that be interpolated to a landscape is another really important question to consider. So lastly, I'm gonna talk about some of the findings from the traditional ecological knowledge as well. If I have time, some of the historical inventories if not I'll leave that part off. But we had a lot of information from scholars in this area about the kinds of indigenous stewardship that was going on in the Klamath. So we know, for example, that people have been there since at least the terminal place to seen. And we know that there was really sophisticated application of fire technology by the tribes in this area, which are ongoing to this day. And specifically, the native history suggests the substantial contribution to the fire regime. And at our lake sites, aground talk and Fish Lake, we know from members of this tribe that both sites were gathering places for acorns and mushrooms and that they needed these low level, low fuel levels, low biomass, these open forest conditions to actually cultivate the kind of crops that they were interested in. And some work from the 1970s speculates that there are about 2,000 to 3,000 people before colonization. So that just gives an idea of how many people you would be needing to feed from these crops. It's quite a few people. In the contemporary, Dr. Frank Lake has done an oral history from members of the Karuk and Yurok tribe and his dissertation work that we were able to draw on. And what he found is that from tribal members, they already know that their traditional lands are really over enriched in biomass. They know that the forest is super dense. And in fact, they compare it to, quote, an ecological and cultural desert. This came out of some work from Berkeley professor Sauerwein a couple of years ago. And in fact, one of the Krug elders that Dr. Frank Lake interviewed said that, quote, we've never had this much fuel on the ground. So there's already this convergence between the empirical side about the ahistorical peaks and biomass on this landscape with what the traditional ecological knowledge and oral history is saying. So it's a really nice consistency. And I just wanna make mention here that indigenous burning also isn't a monolith. And in the Klamath there's something like 70 uses of fire that have been on the landscape. And that kind of pyro diversity really supported a mosaic of vegetation types. So this really homogenous dense forest is again, super ahistorical in this context. So those kinds of different fire were developing and evolving over time. And one example of this is the Tula Watt pattern which occurred about 1500 BP. Onwards was this time period of more migration into the Klamath area from the north and more intensive land usage and very likely more burning. So this is a really fascinating area and there's a lot of history just in what happened with the burning trends. I think I'm getting close on time but I will just quickly talk about some of my findings from the colonial era because it's this transition point between the late Holocene and indigenous lead management to Euro-American management that it continued through the modern period. What's really interesting is that there's ecological data from this period from the public land survey data. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that but I'm gonna talk about it. It's really nice written record of what the forest and the kinds of trees that were on the landscape but this is a really important period, the colonial era because it does mark, as I said, this transition but particularly the before period before fire suppression. So it gives you this glimpse into what the forest might have looked like more of a snapshot really than anything from these 20th century changes that were coming. And so I like to use this image of what the forest potentially looked like because this is a real picture from up in the area that I worked from 1910.  So that was the main question I came into this work with was what did this forest look like in the 1880s which is when the public land survey was completed. And in case you're not familiar this actually occurred over much of the US everywhere where you see these colors is where the public land survey took place. And so it had this regional coverage in California which is really nice and what happened is that you'd have people going out who would take field notes and they would document in a really specific way the kinds of trees and their size and their location on the landscape. And so what I was able to do as I calculated I think it was about 21,000 trees were in my data set by the time I got through extracting the tree records. And I was able to find this really big structural change on the landscape. So if you look at what was collected in this historic data set shown in black versus the contemporary as you can see that on our Y axis with density is that it really, really increased in this area is about three times more dense than it was in historic period. And the same goes for the basal area of this landscape. So that again, really just consistent with what we would expect based on the oral history and the ecology of this area after fire suppression. And there was also a lot of compositional change based on this data set. So again, the historic in black and the contemporary in gray, the relative dominance of different taxa by basal area changed a lot. So we have this increase in basal area and Douglas fir from about 34% of the landscape and the historic period to almost 45%. Pines were actually about the same but really dramatic change in the oak taxa where you had a lot more oaks on landscape something like 21% of landscape was oaks in this area in the 1880s. But unfortunately that's dropped to about 9% in the contemporary period. So this huge oak loss which has been documented around California as well. So that gives us a really nice quantitative view as well of this landscape. And when you look at the fire records from Cal Fire you can see the really effective fire suppression in this area. So this is all the wildfires that occurred in Six Rivers since 1908. And you can see that in terms of area burned in hectares is there was almost no fire in the 20th century. And then of course that's changed a lot in the last 20 years but that really aligns with the policies that we knew were occurring. So just to sum up here these results there's about three times more trees on landscape today than there was in 1880. And these modern forests contain a lot more dug for and less oak but about the same amount of pine and that this fire suppression is probably driving the densification in this area. So I think I'm probably not gonna have time to go through this unfortunately. So we can get some questions. But what we recently did in an article was combine all of the different methods that I just talked to you through. And we were able to synthesize and produce this biomass record for the area over 3,000 years and really show the strong impact an indigenous influence of keeping the biomass levels really low in this area. Again, this is what a low biomass forest look like versus a high biomass one and that there was a really long pattern of this at least 1,000 years of low biomass before the modern period here on the right. And in fact, it's about half of what it was today. So the median tree biomass until colonization was about 100 megagrams per hectare then in colonization we see the skyrocketing of biomass and it's about doubled out on the landscape today. I'm just gonna skip this slide and just present our main findings with all of this work. We went through it all these different methods and the Karukin ethnographic data is super vital about these watersheds and that coupled with the fire scar and charcoal history suggests that indigenous stewardship really strongly contributed to the fire regime on this landscape. Our biomass records and the records from the 1880 public land survey also suggests that frequent fire limited the biomass on this landscape relative to how productive these sites can be that we see today really high levels of biomass and that the consistency between our biomass record and these other independent lines of evidence is strong and it gives us more confidence in these results. And so I think going forward if we can integrate paleo and ethnographic records that can be a really powerful way of understanding the ecology of the past and particularly in California when so much of our contemporary forest is unprecedented in at least 3000 years that's becomes really important for restoration ecologists and going forward I think indigenous forest and fire management will be critical to maintaining forest conditions not only those conditions before colonization but helping to restore and have any kind of historical fidelity with the landscape of the past. And so this is basically saying the same thing but just increasing engagement with tribes and the fact that we will probably need a very large scale intervention if we want to achieve historical fidelity and also to temper our expectations about how much carbon we can realistically store in the landscape for a long period of time. So I wanna say thank you to my collaborators and co-authors, my funding sources and to you for listening and I hope I have time to take some questions. Thank you. All right, thank you Clark. I guess before we move on to questions I'll point out for those of you who are interested in this and want to find out more we just had a paper come out two weeks ago I should say Clark had a paper come out in PNAS that covers all of this. And so if you wanna do a deeper dive and look into some of the data, it's all there. Do we have any questions? Dave, hey, great to see you. This is Kent Lightfoot. Can I have actually two quick questions? Sure. Clark that was a really fabulous talk. Great, great presentation. So my question is you got very good evidence that we've got a little ice age there's definitely a successful cultural burning going on and continuing when do you think it actually starts? That is you obviously, you've got a 3000 year window. Is it, it's obviously looks like it's late Holocene but is there, do you see like a when you really begin to see the cultural burning taking place? Oh, can you hear me? Yeah, it cut out. Oh, sorry, it cut out for me. Yeah, that's a great question. I think actually if I go back maybe to this figure, I think unfortunately it's a bit inconclusive but and that's again, I think a bit muddled because of medieval climate warming we would expect more fire in the landscape just from how hot and dry it is. But you do see it pick up in the little ice age. I wish we could conclusively say it's been going on for several thousands of years according to our record but where it really stands out was a little ice age from the oral history as far as my understanding is those, you know, they're not geologically dated. So unfortunately, there's not that kind of specificity from that kind of record. So I think unfortunately it really is just inconclusive but my guess is that if it was happening in the little ice ages that it probably had to be developed by those people before then as well. So it is a tantalizing kind of like it it was probably happening much further beyond that as well. Yeah, well that's good. Hey, my second question is Joe so what are you doing with the USGS right now? You know, what's your current research? Are you still doing this kind of research? I am still doing this kind of research and I'm also broadening a bit. So as you can see this talk focused a ton on carbon which I love thinking about carbon in California. I'm also bringing in water now as another main piece of my work. So with Dave and others in his lab we're looking at atmospheric rivers and how they might be present in the geologic record again using lake sediments as one of our ways of detecting this. So atmospheric rivers, carbon and as well as continuing to work with and build bridges with tribal communities is definitely part of my portfolio right now. Excellent. Hey, well anyway, great job. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Okay, it sounds like Junco has a question about Oaks. Oh, yes. Thank you very much for a really interesting presentation. I work on prehistoric archeology in Japan where the issue of the use of acorns is a major topic. And one of the things that I'm very curious about is the characters being shade in torrent plans because Japanese archeologists used to think that well, acorn processing, wild food, no need for management. But I think the more we learn about ecology and also many people started to work on slash and burn agriculture and burning the field. We realized that, okay, in no way we realized that, okay, in order to maintain the harvest of acorns to what extent people needed to do environmental management. So my question is to what extent burning and I think it's kind of tied to Ken's question how far the evidence of burning goes back and does that correspond and increase use of acorns as a staple food in your research area? Yeah, that's a great question. Thank you so much for asking it. I think it probably must be tied to it because we know that, you know, tan oak was used for acorns. There's actually several other species of oak in this area that were important for food stuffs. So, you know, talking to some crook members today is that they did try to cultivate these acorns right around the lakes. And, you know, we did find evidence of very frequent burning from our fire scar record taken from tree stumps right around these lakes as well. So I imagine so and, you know, given that we think there are several thousand people at least as part of these communities with villages probably scattered and many of these prime locations with water access points is that there probably is a huge tie there with fire and acorns. One of the downsides of this work, although we had a lot of resolution from using these two culturally significant lakes is that it's unclear exactly how far out to extrapolate this information. We think there's reason to believe that this would be happening in similar places throughout this area, but just in terms of like the spread of how far it would be, it's a bit unclear. We think at least a kilometer, this work would be true for at least a kilometer around each of our lake sites based on some other modeling work that we've done. So it's not a very satisfying answer to your question, but I do agree that if there was a lot of people and they were putting fire in landscape and they did use these acorns, that they're gonna be cultivating cork us using fire, but just how far back that goes, it's pretty inconclusive from the evidence we have right now in terms of the time. Yeah. Thank you. All right. Any more questions here? All right, well, thank you. Once again, Clark, that was a really interesting talk. Thank you so much for having me. And thank you, Arff, for hosting. Sure, thank you. I wanted to quickly mention that today at 2 p.m., one of our grad students, A.J. White, is offering a workshop on perlioclimate databases. Those databases are the one hosted by NOAA. And I'll go ahead and paste the link to the Zoom in the chat here. So if anybody's interested in joining us in one hour, this is the A.J.'s workshop. Hey, Nick goes, someone's asking if a video of the talk will be available. Yeah, I'll post this on our YouTube channel within a week or so. Great. All right, fantastic. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Thanks for a great talk. Yeah. Thank you.


Hi, everyone. I just wanted to say hello and give everybody a few more minutes to get logged on. And while I have you, I just wanted to test my audio and my screen sharing. So I'm just going to flip through the first couple of slides. And if you could just let me know in the questions box, if you're able to hear me speaking right now, and if you were able to see me move my slides, that would be a huge help so that I know that everybody can see me and hear me for the presentation. So again, you could just go right into your questions box and type in yes or no, and just let me know if you're able to actually see my screen. That would be a huge help. Okay, thank you guys. Thank you guys so much. I'm going to put my, oh actually, it's three o'clock, so I will just go ahead and get started. Welcome everyone to our March 1st, March webinar. Today, we're going to be talking about upgrading your website's donation processing. My name is Linda Gerhard, and I'm the Senior Community Engagement Manager here at Mighty Cause. And I'm sure if you've attended our webinars before, you've heard my voice in my field before. But just as a quick intro, I've been with Mighty Cause since 2016. And before that, I worked with nonprofits or for nonprofits, I should say, specifically animal shelters and animal welfare. So I have been in the nonprofit trenches. You can always reach out to me if you wanted to chat. My email is listed here, lindaatmightycause.com. And just so you know, we are recording this webinar so everyone will have access to the recording and the slides and we'll have some time for a live Q&A at the end of the presentation. So if you think of something while I'm presenting, go ahead and type that into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel and we'll make sure to get to it at the end. Excellent. And I just wanted to start with a quick poll. So let me just start that up for you. All right. So I just wanted to get an idea of where everyone's at with your donation collection. So if you could just take a minute and let me know what you're currently using, whether you're using a button, a widget, a form, if you're using a combination, just so that we can get an idea of where everybody is so that when we move forward, we can talk about what the upgrades might be. So I'll just give you a minute to fill this out. And so far, it actually looks like the most popular option, which doesn't surprise me, is a button. That is what a lot of nonprofits primarily use. So I'll give you just another second. Coming in second, actually, at this point, it's a tie between a donation form and a combination of everything above, which is really interesting. All right. So I'll go ahead and close this poll and share the results with you. Yeah, so most everybody set a button and there was a tie between donation forms and a combination of the above. So yeah, that was just interesting to me. So I will go back to sharing my presentation. I lost my slides. Here we go. All right. So we're going to talk about all of those methods for collecting donations on this webinar. So it's good to see that a lot of people are starting with a button because that's kind of where we're starting with this webinar. And so we're going to start off with some donation processing basics and just go through what this webinar is about, what this donation processing is all about, just so we're all on the same page. The short answer to what donation processing is, is that it's a user interface that supporters use to make a monetary donation to your nonprofit, usually using a credit card or another digital payment method. It consists of two basic components, the donation processing interface itself, which can be a donation button or a widget like we just talked about with the poll. And this is where you'll collect your donor information and may be able to do a little bit of customization to change what kind of data you're collecting from your donors. And the second part is the actual payment processing, the transaction, the financial transaction that happens when a donor makes a decision to give your organization a certain amount of money. This process is or at least should be the central part of any nonprofit's digital presence. The donation processing is really the endpoint where you want all of your digital campaigns, your website, and even your social media presence to point. You want to guide users to donation processing. There are three basic types of donation processors. The first and probably the most common, which we all just saw on the poll, is a donation button. And what a button is, is it usually is a hyperlinked image that takes the user to an outside source where they can complete the payment for their donation. The best and most common example of this is the PayPal button, and Mighty Cause also has our own button as well. A step up from a button is a widget, which is actually embedded on your website, usually with an iframe embed code. And that basically imports the interface that donors use to donate from another website, another platform, and that inserts it onto your own website, which allows them to complete their donation without ever having to leave your website. Mighty Cause has one of those as well. And it's one of our most popular tools. That's actually how most people find out about Mighty Cause. And the easiest way to think about it is that it's inserting a tiny piece of Mighty Cause onto your website so they can make a donation and it's processed by Mighty Cause. Their donation shows up in your donation report, but they never actually have to visit Mighty Cause.com. And the last type is a donation form, which is usually also embedded on your website. And it's a longer donation form that's usually more focused on collecting donor information. So it has kind of the basic functionality of a widget, but it's longer and it leaves you a little bit more room for customization since a widget has a little bit of a space limitation. And the form gives you a little bit more flexibility to add some questions and some custom data collection. Now it's important to note that none of these types of donation processors are better than the other. And as we saw with the poll, a lot of organizations use a combination of these to collect donations at various points with users. Now there are some key functions of a donation processor that are going to be really important as we get into this webinar. And we just want to define what those key functions are. So the first thing is data. Every donation is an opportunity for your non-profit to form a long-lasting relationship with a donor. And if you are not collecting the right data, or if you don't have access to the data that's collected when the donation is made, that's going to impact your ability to follow up and start stewarding your donors, which is the process of increasing your relationship with that donor and getting them to come back and get involved with your non-profit again and again. And obviously the financial transaction part is super important. People need to feel confident that their payment is secure. And you need to be confident that it's reliable. If you aren't able to have donors complete a transaction, if they can't complete a payment, then you're going to lose those donors. And finally, donation processing should make it easy and convenient for donors and utilize the tools that are available, like Autofill, to make it even easier for them to make their donation and also accept multiple different payment methods. The easier something is for people to do, the more likely they are to do it. So it's really important that your donation processor be easy to use. So now that we've talked about the basics, we're going to talk about some best practices with donation processors, which hopefully will help you identify the ways in which your donation processor may not be working for you or there might be some room for improvement. One of the most basic and important functions of a nonprofit's donation processor is setting up recurring donations. Now, unfortunately, there are some donation processors that don't make this easy, like PayPal, and some don't even offer the option at all. But recurring donors are really the key to building a sustainable nonprofit. This is reliable, dependable income. So if you're not able to capture recurring donations, you honestly should switch donation processors as soon as possible, to be completely honest. The other side of this is when the recurring donation is set up, how can the donor manage it? Recurring donors may churn, meaning that they don't continue their donation. They end their donation if they can't update their card or change their amount of their donation or the payment date so that it withdraws on a different day. So not having a good system for donors to make recurring donations to set them up and then to manage them once they're in place can be a real hurdle when you're trying to grow your organization and grow your donor base. And our recommendation is that you really should only consider donation processors, whether that's mighty cause or not, that make recurring donations a priority. And because mighty cause is all about getting recurring donations going and making it easy to manage, donors can set up a recurring donation with the click of a button, and they don't have to restart a donation if they want to change the amount. They have full control of that through their user account. So that way you don't ever lose a recurring donation because a card expired, which is a really tragic way to lose a donor is that their credit card expired and nobody told them or it just completely canceled the donation. So having a donation processor that has some steps in place to let you and let the donor know if there needs to be an update is just sort of a basic thing that all donation processors need to do, but sadly, not all of them do. This is something you'll hear a lot in talk of e-commerce friction reduction. And basically what this means is making it easy for donors to make a payment and also making it easy for them to return and make another payment. So just as an example of how this works, I was talking to a colleague this week when I was prepping for this webinar, and she mentioned that she had gone to a nonprofit's website to make a donation. She had followed a social media post, but it didn't allow her to use the autofill function that would have allowed her to plug her payment information, including her credit card information into the donation processor. So she would have had to have stopped, got up, dug out her wallet, got her credit card, and then manually entered that information into the donation processor in order to complete the transaction. And she ended up not doing it. She didn't end up making that donation because it wasn't convenient for her, and it didn't work for her at that time. I believe she was sitting at her desk trying to work and wanted to do it very quickly, and she was not able to do that. So that nonprofit lost a donor because the donation processor had made it too hard for her, and she had all of the information literally at her fingertips, but that processor just didn't allow her to use them. So these seem like really small things. These are tiny technical details, but donors opt out of completing their donation every single day because of this. This is a really common reason why donors don't complete their donations. And it's also really a common reason when we talk about e-commerce, why people might abandon their carts. So when somebody takes the effort to put a bunch of things in their cart on a website like Amazon, and they end up going, oh no, it's partially in many cases because they have to find their credit card and complete that transaction. So that's what we're talking about with friction reduction. So a donation processor should be able to accept auto-fills, allow people to use saved cards, as well as to save their cards to the donation processors so that if they come back, they can just easily check out and allow for different payment methods.  And those things will cost you donors, unfortunately. And to that end, I also just wanted to quickly note because it's pretty exciting that Mighty Cause gives users the ability to actually pay through their bank accounts through an ACH withdrawal for donations over $100, which just adds another option for donors to make their payment. So friction reduction is something that you're really looking for when you're evaluating whether your donation processor is working or looking at a new one. This is an extension of friction reduction, and that's being mobile friendly. And this is because most of us are doing everything from our phones nowadays. So you should operate under the assumption that everyone is using their phones. That's actually how most websites are designed. They're designed mobile first. But sometimes these older tools, they are not mobile friendly. And I've encountered this a lot with nonprofit donation forms where I have to zoom in to even see the fields that are there. And some widgets and some donation forms will just completely not function on smartphones. So you will lose donors if you add extra steps for them. And so if I'm sitting on a couch, I'm scrolling through social media and I go to your nonprofit's website and I want to make a donation, I should be able to complete that from my phone. If I have to switch to a completely different device to make a donation, odds are you've lost me. And that's true for most people. Most of us also have our payment information that's just saved on our phones as well. I have a droid and if I just use a fingerprint, I can automatically load my payment information, all my contact information, my shipping address and so on. And if I can't do that, you're in danger of losing me. So unfortunately, I'm not in particularly in particular lazy, but most people are like this because we have all of these tools set up to make our lives a little bit easier and so we can get in and out of transactions easier. And if we can't use them, we're likely to just opt out of it entirely.  So moving away from things that are more donor facing, another best practice and important factor in donation processing is integration.  Is it easy to get donor information out of one place and into another? And when we talk about fundraising techniques, there's a lot to consider here. So if you use a PayPal button, how are you going to run a peer to peer campaign? Does that mean that you have to use a completely different donation processor because you want to do a peer to peer campaign or an event? Do you have to start from scratch if you want to try a new technique for fundraising? This is going to have a huge impact on the admin side of your fundraising and also your stewarding. So make sure you're looking for a donation processor that can talk to the other tools and software that you use in your daily office work. The issue of donor data access is a real big issue. The best practice is to allow nonprofits to have full access to their donor data, but believe it or not, some donation processors don't do that. A good example of this is Facebook. Nonprofits basically get a list of transactions or payments that were made, but not the actual donor data. So you may not know who made that payment, where it came from, how that person's email address, how you can get in touch with them. And the reason for that is that Facebook wants ownership of your donor's data and they want to use it to they want to use donation processing. The reason they have that functionality on their platform is a way to reduce friction for other purchases and transaction on Facebook. So that data when you use Facebook is not considered to be yours. It belongs to Facebook and they do utilize it to increase their profit and further their business. But of course, you need that donor data so that you can follow up with your donors. You can get to know them. You can bring them into the fold at your nonprofit. And you also want to have some degree of control over that data so that you can make your donors feel secure. And they know that nobody is using their data when they make a donation to your nonprofit to sell them things or email them or whatever purpose may the purposes are commonly used when people buy lists. So a best practice here is to look for a donation processor that gives you full unfettered access to your donor donor data and the ability to customize it. And of course, Mighty Cause provides robust donation reports. We never use your donor data for anything other than passing it on to you. The only reason we'll even contact one of your donors is if their card for a recurring donation is about to expire or something along those lines. And that's because we really consider that these are your donors and this is your donor data. It does not belong to us. And so really that's a question you should ask with your donation processor. Do I have access to all of this donor data? And is there anything that I'm missing? And do I get what I need from the data that I receive? So next up is fees, which is a popular topic. So a good donation processor will allow donors to cover fees for you, whether they're platform fees or transaction fees. Mighty Cause always allows donors to cover fees. And I mentioned this because we find that donors are really happy to pick up those fees for you. It's usually a really negligible amount for them. And they want to help. That's the reason they're making a donation. So a donation processor should make it really super easy for donors to cover fees for you. In a lot of cases, it's not even a dollar that they're adding on to their donation. One donation processor that does not allow this is PayPal, which means that they come out of your payout and that the donor can't choose to chip in an extra 2.9 percent to help you out. And just to be clear, because there is sometimes some confusion about this, a platform fee would be what a charge that comes from the donation processor for using their service. And there's a different fee that we commonly call a transaction fee that is charged by the credit card companies, which is usually around 2.9 percent. So when you hear no fees, keep in mind that transaction fees are still present. They are charged to whoever is accepting that payment. It's just a question of who is paying for that fees. So you want to make sure that donors have the option to cover those fees for you because we have found over years and years of operating that donors are more than happy to do that. And lastly, I wanted to talk about branding, which is your nonprofit's logo and colors and the other visual signifiers that let people know that they are dealing with your organization. A lot of donors can be hesitant to give if they're taken to an outside website or payment processor because they want to be safe and protect their payment information. So if they end up going out to this other site and it's not something that they recognize and they don't see those visual signifiers that tell them that this is your organization, they may not feel comfortable making a donation there. So being able to add your nonprofit's branding is really important to make your donors feel comfortable and safe. And that's one of the reasons why using something that is embedded on your website is really ideal because they're staying in that space that belongs to your nonprofits and the donor never has to wonder if this link you sent them is legit or worry that it's maybe been hijacked. These are things that very rarely happen, but donors do worry about.  Even if that's through an iframe, they're staying on your website and just completing it in that little piece that you're pulling in with an iframe in bed or with a forum in bed. So being able to customize branding and add branding to your receipts is really important because sometimes you'll get a receipt. That's just a payment receipt and they don't recognize the name of the company that processed their donation and it can be really jarring for them and not a great experience if they don't feel like, hey, this went to the right place. So that's just really important to consider as well is are you able to add some branding to your donation processing? Alright, so we're in the home stretch and now that we've talked about sort of what donation processing is and the best practices, I just wanted to wrap it up by talking about how you can optimize your donation process. So when you're looking to optimize your donation process, the first step is really taking stock of what you have in place right now. What does your donation process look like? What can donors do and what can't they do? What data are you collecting? Is there anything you need but are not collecting in your current donation process and asking questions like that? You basically want to look for any holes in your donation process that you can fill, whether that's on the user side, meaning what the user sees or from the admin side, but your nonprofit experiences. Are there any challenges you face in getting your donor data from one side to the other? Or are you having difficulties keeping your book straight because you're downloading a list of transactions and you don't know which transaction came from which donor? So those kinds of questions will really help you take stock of where you are and where you might need to go. The most common thing that I honestly see from people, especially when it comes to their websites, is that they have a place to donate, but it's not on their main navigation menu. So they'll have information there where you can find history of the organization, you can learn the names of board members, you can learn about upcoming events, but donate is not in that navigation menu. And that's really important because as a top-level option on your donation menu or your navigation menu, I should say, that's going to follow users everywhere they go on your site. So you don't want to hide that in a sub-menu. You don't want to have that just in one particular place. You want that to be a top level action item on your website. So that's something that I see a lot is that you have to go into a menu and find out how to donate. It should be a top-level option. It should be obvious from every page they're on on your website. So taking a look at where you are right now, that can help you figure out where you need to go and what you need to improve to make it a more optimized seamless process for your donors. And here are some simple things that you can do to upgrade. You can add customization, like adding suggested donation amounts and impact descriptions. These are things that are really powerful for donors because you're literally catching them when they're trying to decide how much to give. So you can use the suggested donation amount to sort of let them know what an appropriate donation amount is and what you're looking for and then add a description that tells them what that provides. So for instance, if you want to put $50 on your donation form as a suggestion and that provides a week's worth of food for a family at your food bank just to pull an example out of thin air, that can really push people toward giving in a certain amount. So using that kind of customization can be really helpful. And as we talked about, adding some branding is helpful too when you're looking at upgrading your donation process. And even if you're doing some of these things, think about what else you can add to the process, like adding a custom question that might help you collect important information from donors and then literally upgrade the processing processor that you're using. So if you're using a button, try moving to a widget or adding a widget. If you're using a widget already, why not try incorporating a longer form that you can embed on your website and you can increase the number of ways that you're getting donations. So I see this really commonly. You have one page on your website, which we just talked about, where people can make donations. But where can you add the ability to capture donations? Can you make it easier for people to find where to donate? Some things to consider would be, say, adding a widget to a blog post. If your nonprofit has a blog, you can absolutely embed a widget in there. And finally, take a look at your recurring donation situation.  Are you making specific appeals for people to donate on a monthly basis? If you're using a PayPal button, for instance, you may want to switch to something else so that you can make this a lot easier for your donors to contribute on a regular basis. Because as we talked about, these recurring donors who give every single month provide ongoing support, they provide predictable revenue, and they're really the foundation upon which you'll build a robust fundraising program. And so before I go and we get to the live Q&A, I do need to sneak in some promotion of our advanced plan because Mighty Cause Advanced offers every single thing that we've talked about in this webinar from embeddable donation forms and widgets, recurring donation management customization and adding your non-profits branding, full access to your donor data and robust reporting, and integrations that make your follow-ups even easier. We have a Salesforce integration, a MailChimp integration, and we have integrations with thousands of apps that are on Zapier. So there's a lot of different ways that you can streamline your back office management through Mighty Cause Advanced. Everybody is eligible to get a free trial. So if you're already on Mighty Cause, you can just go to your organization's dashboard and go into payment plan, which is in your settings, and just start your trial right there. And if you're new to Mighty Cause, just go to mightycause.com or send me an email after the webinar and we'll make sure that you are set up with your free trial. And you may need a demo before Hansa will set that up for you. So just trying it out and setting up for setting up in a trial for advance is a great first step. If you're, you know, for instance, currently using a PayPal button and you're looking at taking the next step to streamline and optimize your donation processing. So we're happy to help you out. So just feel free to email me if you're interested in starting your free trial and I will do what I can. All right. So that was it. I kept it to 27 minutes, which I'm pretty proud about. So I just wanted to make some time for questions. So if you have a question, just go ahead into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel and we'll try to get to them. Okay. Did my audio cut out? I got a few messages saying that they were having trouble with audio. Well, I'll try sharing the recording. So if you signed on and there were some audio problems, I can certainly send you the recording and hopefully that is okay. All right. Okay. There is confirmation that you guys can hear me. I had a little bit of a panic attack thinking that no one can hear me. All right. It doesn't look like there's any questions. So I don't want to hold everybody up. Oh, actually. All right. Here we go. Can we use a Patreon page for getting recurring donations? That's actually a really interesting question that is something that you can do. But Patreon is really geared toward content creators like people who have YouTube channels and podcasts. So I'm not quite sure about the tax-deductibility situation. Certainly using something that's a little bit more geared toward nonprofits, I think is ideal. For instance, on Mighty Cause, we will send your donors a tax receipt. You can include a little message in there and with advance, you can actually completely use your branding and make it your receipt. And that way they have the record that they need to claim the deduction on their taxes. So I'm not entirely sure if Patreon does that just because the customer base that they serve is more content creators whose contributions to them are not tax-deductible generally.  Using a Patreon can be a way to get ongoing support. But if you're able to, I would really highly recommend trying to get something that's more geared toward nonprofits. Like Mighty Cause, there's other platforms as well. Obviously, I'm biased toward Mighty Cause. But Patreon is an option. I'm not super familiar with how tax-deductibility would work with them, though. Let's see. How soon can we access today's webinar? Will it be uploaded to YouTube like the last webinar? Yes. So I'm going to do my best to get that uploaded to YouTube and sent out to everybody very soon. Unfortunately, YouTube is a little bit slow, so it takes a little time to get it actually uploaded in HD. But it will be there, and I'll send everybody an email with the slides as well as soon as I'm able to. Let's see. Can you be more specific on the differences between advanced and free accounts? Yeah. So the basic difference is that you get access to some additional tools with Mighty Cause Advanced. You get to use our CRM tool. So if you don't have a donor base, if you're not using something like Salesforce, then Mighty Cause Advanced would have a donor database that's already there for you and that you can use so that you can professionalize your stewarding. You can also get access to embeddable forms with Mighty Cause Advanced. The forms are an upgrade. So if you're using a widget currently and you want to try out a form, I would try setting up a trial for Mighty Cause Advanced and seeing if a form is something that you're interested in upgrading to. In most cases, we do find that it is a better option for nonprofits. And our integrations are also a key feature that's available to advanced nonprofits. So if you use MailChimp, if you use Salesforce, and we do have some exciting integrations coming down the pipeline, I can't announce them yet, but we have some exciting stuff upcoming. And anything through the Zapier Library, they have integrations with thousands of apps. So Gmail, Google Sheets, Google Docs, all sorts of things through the Zapier App Store can be utilized through Mighty Cause Advanced. So if you're looking for integrations with different programs and pieces of software, that's a really key piece. And the other thing that is not as relevant now because we can't have as many live events, but we also offer text to give through Mighty Cause Advanced. So when things are a little bit more safer and everybody's vaccinated and we're having those in-person events again, text to give is something that you can add to your fundraising toolkit. And people can make donations on the fly from their smartphones. So it's really easy and you get unlimited keywords. And then, yeah, you can actually go to mightycause.com slash pricing. We actually have a chart there that tells you what the differences are between the different plans that are available on Mighty Cause. So that's mightycause.com slash pricing. All right. So what are the fees associated with your product? That's a question from Davin. I would go to the pricing page. You can see that broken down much more accurately than I would probably be able to stumble through right now there. And you can see the breakdown of the value that you get for each of the packages that are available. So that's mightycause.com slash pricing. And I'll actually include a link to that in the follow-up email as well. It's a question from Ryan. Does Mighty Cause's free plan include mobile phone donation? So there's a couple of different plans. If you've been a Mighty Cause customer for a while, please let me know if you won't lose any access to any tools. But yeah, you can donate mobile at any time through our website. We are completely mobile responsive and we are designed mobile first. So when you go to make a donation, it'll look good on a smartphone. It'll look good on a desktop computer. And people can make donations. So there's nothing special that's needed. However, if you wanted to implement text to give, which I think you might be asking about here, you would want to upgrade to Mighty Cause advanced. That is helpful in a lot of situations. That's where a donor would text a keyword and then be able to start their donation process from there. Obviously, since we aren't having a lot of live events, that's not something that's in super high demand right now. But anybody can donate to a nonprofit on mightycause.com through their smartphone. But if you're looking for text to give specifically, then yeah, you would want to upgrade to Mighty Cause advanced. All right, so I think that's it for the questions for today. Thank you all so much for joining me. If you think of anything after we say goodbye, then you can feel free to email me. I'm happy to answer any questions about donation processing that may come up for you. And again, you'll all have access to the recording and slides. And thank you all again so much. I appreciate you spending the time with me today. So happy fundraising.


Good morning Today he's trying to see stuffy honey He's gonna try to knock another one off his bucket list And what's that? It's the king of ducks. I've shot that. You have? Yeah I have a picture of it even. I tried to cook it and I ruined it I'm excited. It's been a while Tana. It's been a while Oh, you know what I was thinking of? It's how good you've been shooting. So hopefully today Tana shows us up again Hopefully. Maybe even slocks a canvas back or something. Dad in town said they ain't gonna have no mercy today Oh, no. All right. We'll see. We'll see Have a good day. We're going home hopefully. As you can see we've got some cans out here Kind of working this spot hopefully it'll come down We've seen the good ol Trifecta flying around so I think we're gonna try to try to go for that today See what happens It's a good day. Got a slight wind. Not too cold. A little bite.  I'm out here with Taylor and Travis and Talon this morning A little pond that we, me and Taunce had seen the other probably a couple weeks ago And we hunted actually we were actually doing like a live Instagram at the time Anyways, we were set up on the north end of this pond today. We're gonna set up on the south end We have a southeast Wind so the wind should be over our back right shoulder Talon and them hunt the south end of it and they did pretty good I think Talon shot a stud trait can didn't you Talon? Yeah, and then our Travis shot a can a hand So they there's the birds here They think we could definitely shoot maybe a Trifecta here So they didn't see much green wings, but they said blooms and cinnamon So anyways the wind would be over our back right shoulder the Sun They're probably not gonna be much Sun today because it's overcast and sprinkling right now We'll see if it breaks up later. Talon might be shooting a 20 gauge today. You shooting your 20 day? Okay, so everybody's shooting our 12 today. Everybody's using heavy metal a 3 inch 4 shot and other than that I don't know what else information to give you. It's not very cold We'll say that so stay tuned. Let's get some birds. Oh Nice shot Travis that's Spoonie Rocky oh Had a rocky note. I wanted to bring it but I don't want to sleep in the truck on that bunch of shoveless. I Should have shot him earlier. I guess I Thought they were gonna land. Yeah, I kind of hesitated. Yeah, I didn't really know if I wanted to shoot him I was like was it a can? Oh Got it It was a reaction shot dude, and then after I did I was like that was a can I bet Well, at least we eat good I haven't shown him so long you lied to me. You're not to me Stephen Travis towing their sentence That's right. I'm glad they're green wings I don't mind Can't be that lucky to scotch double on Drake Simmons. You guys are wondering where Rocky is. I Had to come straight from work So he couldn't stay I Didn't want to leave him overnight at work, but yeah, I wish I had him right now Scotch double. I just got you double on two straight green. He thought it was Simmons Because it was still pretty dark Would have been really cool. I haven't tried Simmons in several years Slowed down a little bit That's a pain to go get your own duck Nice I shot I crushed him Nice shot. Thanks. What are you using in the gun? Oh, this is one.  Yeah So guys we move the decoys To our right about about 40 yards 50 yards. They kind of all were working like a ride along this line Thinking because the decoys and there's no wind else. There's no motion There was a hen mother that crossed right for me and Trouser arguing it. He says this is Drake I say it was a hen, but he was close like how far do you think he was Travis for me 25 yards? That the hen mother or as you would never you would say Drake. I don't know. I just didn't I want to share it What Travis words of wisdom December let's be the best one towns that nothing we can't even go.  How's this America like we were completely fine You know, yeah, I got a hen cams back I'm gonna cook her up and sorry for getting a little frustrated earlier about shooting a hen because I was thinking in my mind I could only shoot one and I forgot I was like why did I even say that I could shoot too She'll still eat the same though. I'm gonna cook her up. I Gotta pluck some feathers on trusty much fat. She's got but What do you think Taylor? Yeah, you guys ate that one the other day No buffer. They're really good. Yeah, it looks good. Yeah, I did it. Oh right, Rob So I got the hands back and I start to double them as teal and then Taylor and got the hen ring neck earlier Travis got to him show her Telling God Drake dreaming So I mean hey could have been worse six birds and a good eating one. So We'll call that a good day. No complaints there and it was fun to get out with him I don't think I'm even hunting with Taylor this year. I'm with you this year. No, so Anyways, and really have it handed with Travis like a ton. It was good to get out easy walk Honestly, there's nothing to complain about and close shots were close could have shot a hen Mallard I just passed on it trust a little mad at me. I think for that Yeah, and then he shoots the henshiller And yeah, we're not gonna go there But let me know how you guys are doing it down in the comments below where you're at and how the hunting is for you guys Thought it'd be a little bit better this time of year, but this place when it gets a south wind Not the greatest and we got some guy other friends here on the other side of the refuge and they're saying it's slow for them too so Sometimes you wonder, you know, is it like where we're at? But now we know it's just the whole refuge is slow So we're gonna get out here and hopefully maybe we can find a taco truck and let us buy a breed or something Like we're kind of desperate now for food That was his first love Now I'm trying to get intoxicated on her Edo's Pure I bet that's pure sugar. Oh, yeah in this thing. No Medicine here, let's look at this here sugars one serving Toast yours 130 grams dear Lord So everybody that doesn't know what a taco truck is that is what it is right there, sorry to show you the food Somebody's recognizable. Hey, I'm right there See you guys on the next one


What's up everybody, Jason from jazzymeascasebrakes.com 2021-2022 Chronicles draft picks box war number one where you're guaranteed a box and a chance to win two more boxes So ladies and gentlemen, this is a six-spot break. First we're gonna number the boxes we have in front of me here One through six then we'll open up whatever box you get randomize. Now where you get to keep your box No matter what happens you get to keep your box, but as an added bonus if you win the war which is Someone that has the lowest number zero number on the left side will win the war Of course in case of a tiebreaker goes to the next lowest number in the box So for example if you have a zero number one out of 99 and someone later in the box A next box has two out of five. Well, guess what one beats two now Of course if two customers have one or the lowest number then it goes to the next number So if someone else can get eight Etc. Etc. So like I said, it's kind of easier what I showed to you guys when we do the war But basically the next closest number will win that War and you get to keep two boxes will she be two boxes ship sealed which is close to a thousand dollar value So in the meantime guys, here's a dice roll. There's a customer name So there's six customer names and then Derek and Brandon won those in a pack filler Of course box one through six. Let's do the randomizer here dice roll it seven times and before I actually do that Let me number these boxes really quick actually flip them this way so you guys can see the white part of it a Little bit easier to work with like that so we're gonna put a Little one right there I'm gonna put a two and a three one two three This would be four This would be five This would be six there you go and again we rolled a seven three and a four one two three four five six seven Josh with the top down to brandon seven times one two three four five six seven Boom box four down to box two As a Joshua you have box four Derek a box one Sean will box six Derek Gordon with box three James with five and Brandon with two so let's actually Tell put that by customer name actually We'll go that way that we'll go that route just because that way we can kind of eliminate customers If they don't have the highest number or lowest number. All right, so let's go then guys Let's go let's go So I got ready with Brandon you have box two and actually before I start this let me print out the labels It's actually easier to do this and I can drop the label into the to every box Box two Good luck And Brandon won this in a pack filler, it's just two big fat packs two hits per box as well You got Greg Brown cave Cunningham. We'll be top-loading the top X amount of pics like Jaylin Suggs Dave yon as well and Herbert Jones Little relic there that is not numbered Not numbered Here's your first numbered card and it's an autograph on card Jaden springer from flux and that is 36 36 out of 49 36 or so far 36 is the lowest number You know Johnson train man Evan Mobley baby on Mitchell Jaylin Suggs, that's 14. There you go. That's the new lowest number there 14 Zyra Williams, Chris Duarte and Cameron Thomas rated rookie that's 22 Either either it's sold out already or we maybe Didn't ever list it because we'll probably save it for another time or or etc etc So either a it already passed two days ago. We did it really quickly, which I'm assuming that's what happened Because if you've seen it there most likely it sold out But if not then yeah, we either took it off the website because it didn't fill or You know, we're saving it for another time Luke of Garza Moses Moody Jaylin Johnson Evan Mobley Jaylin Green Zyra Williams Chris Duarte Jaylin Suggs and Isaiah Jackson It's number to 195 out of 199 185 out of 199 and we got 65 out of 75 Jordan Shackle Scotty Barnes Jaylin Suggs Jaylin Green Ty Jones Jaden Springer Corey Kessburg Scotty Barnes And a silver Corey Kessburg. All right, and that's it So there's the first box. So again, you're lowest number here, Brandon. So far. Obviously you are in the lead Lowest number for you. I Believe it's gonna be 14 So 14 is the number to beat There you go. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna keep these What Keep dialing right there like that Next one up is Derek. You're gonna have box one and box two or box three. Sorry one and three So we'll go with one first and then we'll go with three Jaden Springer Katie Cunningham Jaylin Suggs Cameron Thomas that is numbered 30 out of 99 rookie threads With Corey Kessburg Numbered 80 out of 99 little gold standard rookie patch autograph for the Zach's Jaylin Johnson Kade Cunningham Isaiah Jackson 97 and 99 Trey Mann Jaylin Suggs. Yes, sir But I'm only had a spot in the mystery, but I can't find his order Did he get it through a value hit draft or something that how did he get in there? Oh? Yes, so the value hit draft giveaway. Yeah, the top spot was the mystery right? Yeah, so you did they someone choose that? Yeah, yeah, okay, but I can't find him when I type in mystery great Like I can't find oh no because it was a giveaway. So he was a giveaway. Also, but there was only one spot given away, right? No, yeah one spot. Was he the one that one? Oh Was it two spots? Oh Nine out of 149 we have a new leader Jaylin Suggs That is your leader now. So Derek, you have those now the lowest numbered card in the box war that is nine 009 out of 149 and that's a very nice hit those who as well mosaic rookie of Jaylin Suggs Luka Garza Moses Moody 22 out of 149 Jaylin Johnson Zaire Williams tools of the trade not not numbered and Jordan Shackle that is 124 out of 199 Evan Mowley gave you on Mitchell Scotty Barnes Jaylin Suggs gala Moises Moody there Kate Cunningham and Jaylin So All right. So number nine is the lowest number now in the box war So Derek you are now in the lead and you have one more box. We're gonna open up and see What you got maybe you can top your own box, but again regardless you are going to keep everything so that's kind of the cool thing Technically don't really need it anymore Derek will have yours right there ready All right now box three Trayman Charles Bassie Moises Moody in Johnson Evan Mobley Jaylin Green Zaire Williams Chris Dwarthe and Gayron shark Not numbered Not numbered and gave you on Mitchell very nice college ticket on hard 27 out of 99 27 It's a nice hit right there Oh, we have a gold coming up. So you might even top your own Once you get 10 of 10 Jaylin Green Kate Cunningham Nine Corey Kasper. So you have two nines Two nine. So actually if ends up being like nine as a tiebreaker someone has to get a 10. Well, you have two nines So so far that's actually a really good feed there That means the next customer would have to have two nines as well or loss Kate Cunningham Jaylin Suggs and you have a gold Rayquan gray gold Six out of 10. So there you go. Your lowest numbers now are six nine and nine Definitely very strong right now Six nine and nine And that was a great pack too to be honest A lot of Cades Suggs So numbers to be guys six nine and nine and you still have one more pack Jaylin Suggs Moises Moody There's a relic there that is 80 out of 99 James Bob Knight and Justin Gorman 78 out of 99 Okay, Jackson Evan Mobley gave me on Mitchell and a silver dial. So six nine and nine is the numbers to be guys Someone has to get a five And then you would be in the lead. So let's put you in here Derek. Those are your two Put you right over there Let's continue on James Alex with box five Kate Cunningham Jaylin Suggs Josh Christopher Not numbered and another gave you on Mitchell 44 out of 49.  You got to get a five I'll pack for you buddy Mitchell Chris Duarte they're from on Duggs Not numbered there from elements Or sent are in case I should say and we have 106 Justin Gorman out of 199 from origins Moody Dale Scottie Barnes Zaire Williams Jaylin Green Andy Silver Zaire Williams There you go, buddy Still got a nice hit with that Dave Young, but unfortunately you're not gonna have a chance to win the box war Still nice box though. All right, so we're down to two boxes left Two boxes left All right, next one up is josh was box four Last spot mojo box four Again guys after this I gotta do a quick filler for the uh hockey mixer then quickly gonna run the hockey mixer Then I will do a filler for the football mixer and then we'll run the thursday night football mixer 18 out of 49 strong start. Remember you need a five or you need a six to tie or better We have Jonathan Kaminga 66 No, sorry 88 out of 99 It's goss Okay coming in Jaylin Suggs The Jackson and Dale. I lost pocket for you, buddy Dave Young Mitchell Numbered 52 out of 99 Jonathan Friends Wagner 60 out of 99 Got some numbered cars gotta get better than a six 19 DJ Thunderbird I can also potentially some more numbered cards here and Katie Cunningham Silver though. That's still nice All right, Joshua Not gonna have a chance to win the box war but Nice Cunningham right there as well. All right, it's all up to Sean box six. It is my favorite number Sean We'll box six Come in and get you a number five All you need is five or less and you are the winner five or less All right strong. Good luck buddy box number six Dave Young Mitchell Evan Mobley Jaylin Green First one is Jaylin Johnson Not numbered Brandon Boston jr. 34 out of 49 The on-card scripts earns Jaylin Green and a scottie barn draider rookie 37 out of 99 Whoo last pack.  Sorry Then uh Derek Is gonna win the box war And get two boxes shipped to MC Good luck, buddy Katie Cunningham and your first one in here is numbered 44 to 49 Charles Bassie Jonathan Kaminga Number 31 out of 199 danien jefferson All right, so unless there's a numbered card back there might be derricks kate cunningham Evan Mobley Dave Young Mitchell Christopher Johnson Keon Johnson Trayman Jaylin sucks Zyra Williams And a silver greg brown So there you go, Derek. Congratulations, man. You're gonna get two boxes to you ship sealed And again, if you guys want to run this back, it's just it's actually really fun guys. I mean I was hoping we can get a couple ties and kind of move it to a tiebreaker, but Still very very fun always doing these guys. So Again, everybody still got their box as well, so I'm not gonna go home in the end if Just a little added bonus, of course doing that war. So really appreciate you guys again. This is box war number one I'm not sure if we'll post them another one, but if we do If you guys want to run it back pretty good deal. Appreciate it guys. Jasper's case brace.com