Fen Talk at Ah Haa: Jeremy Sueltenfuss & Andrea Borkenhagen, 6/26

21 Jun Fen Talk at Ah Haa: Jeremy Sueltenfuss & Andrea Borkenhagen, 6/26

Fens are minerotrophic peatlands, usually fed by mineral-rich surface water or groundwater or put simply, one of the main types of wetland.

The Telluride Institute’s newly formed Fen Advisory Project, Sheep Mountain Alliance and the San Migu.el Watershed Coalition have teamed up with Ah Haa School for the Arts, the Wilkinson Public Library and Telluride TV to offer a free presentation by graduate researchers Jeremy Sueltenfuss and Andrea Borkenhagen about their peatland restoration study on the Telluride Ski & Golf Co.’s golf course in the Mountain Village. The event takes place Monday, June 26, 7 p.m., in the Daniel Tucker Gallery at Ah Haa.

Note: The same coalition will present a second lecture by Dr. David Cooper about the history, progress, and future goals for the long-term monitoring study on the Prospect Basin Fens on Thursday,July 20, at Telluride’s Wilkinson Library.

Both presentations are free and open to the general public.

Jeremy Sueltenfuss, PhD candidate, Colorado State University

“David Cooper, Andrea Borkenhagen, and I recently received a research grant,” explained Sueltenfuss, a Ph.D. candidate in Colorado State University’s Department of Forest and Rangeland Stewardship’s Ecology program, “to evaluate the restored and reference peatlands on the Telluride golf course, specifically in terms of peat accumulation over the past few thousand years.”

The study will entail taking peat cores and dating them, identifying moss and sedge community composition over time, as well as comparing how the restored peatlands are functioning against the reference sites.

Jeremy Sueltenfuss is a Colorado native who has been researching the hydrologic and ecological responses of wetlands to restoration for the past eight years. One of his doctoral projects focuses on the restored wetlands on the Telluride Ski & Golf Co.’s golf course.

Andrea Borkenhagen, PhD candidate, Colorado State University

Andrea Borkenhagen is a botanist, with a particularly amazing knack for moss identification. She has worked on fen restoration in the oil sands region of Canada for her graduate work and will be applying that knowledge on the restored fens in Telluride.