WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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What happens here on Santa Rosa Island is
that late in the afternoon during the summer

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months as the land cools down, the fog moves
in from the ocean, and blankets the landscape,

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and then moves off during the next day as
the land heats up.

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In the olden days, before the ranching, there
were shrubs here on the island and they captured

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the fog moisture.

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The shrubs would stick their leaves and twigs
up in the air, and droplets of fog would condense

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on these leaves and twigs and drip to the
ground.

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Those plants are gone now and that capacity
has been lost, and so instead of watering

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the ground during the night, the fog just
blows by the island and doesn't deposit moisture

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here and the soils are dry.

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So a seed that falls on the ground is falling
on a dry place.

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Our thrust right now then is look at how can
we harness fog to nourish plants?

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It's kind of a chicken and an egg situation
where if you don't get the fog, you don't

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get the plants, but you need the plants to
get the fog, and so we have to jump start

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the system by figuring out how to capture
fog.

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We're also looking with rain gauges that we've
adapted to fog monitors to find out how much

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fog moisture actually drips down through the
canopies of various kinds of trees, and how

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much drips down through artificial structures
that we've been putting out.

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So our thinking is that we can identify these
places where there's pretty reliable fog.

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We can capture it by putting up mesh netting,
fencing structures, cages, whatever, to allow

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the fog to condense and plant plants at the
bases of those structures, and thereby have

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the fog water our plants for us, we will be
a long ways along toward jump starting recovery

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out here.