I curate and create all storytelling for River News, Tuolumne River Trust’s collection of features and impact stories. I collaborate with program teams to identify and amplify newsworthy stories aligned with donor and audience interests. I create and edit all writing, photography, and videography in these stories as a one-person media production unit. My story curation also steers the editorial direction of biannual member magazines and monthly email series.
Rocks, Riffles & Floodplains: Restoration Creates Salmon Habitat on the Tuolumne
“From 1848 through the 1950s, gold and gravel mining changed the makeup of the Tuolumne River in a flash, and salmon suffered habitat loss that affected the ecological web throughout the entire watershed. The river is now quiet of salmon, whose numbers have dwindled to less than 1% of their historical numbers.”
Healthy Forests Create Watershed-Wide Resilience: An Interview with Madelyn Guillaume
“Change is going to happen, and we can’t just shelter our forest from that. We need to create a landscape that is adaptable and resilient to the changes we know are coming. It’s not an if; it’s a when, and it’s looking more and more soon than previously understood.”—Madelyn Guillaume, Forest Health Project Manager with Tuolumne River Trust
The Fight for Fish & Flows: TRT Organizes Around New Instream Flow Plan
“I have seen fall-run Chinook in the Lumsden Reach of the Tuolumne many times. They come up from Don Pedro Reservoir, which acts as their ocean since they can no longer reach the Pacific,” shares Cindy Charles, a longtime TRT supporter turned Board Member.
Cindy regularly fishes the Tuolumne’s waters and knows that higher flows mean life. Like the migrating fish, she calls the Tuolumne watershed home, too.
From Protection to Resilience: How Collaborative Stewardship Transformed Forests this Year
Driving down a muddy forest road, Madelyn and Ande, Forest Health Project Managers at TRT, point out a section of forest that TRT prepared for a prescribed burn last year. To the right are tall stands of conifers, gently seasoned black but thriving, with clear and open ground around them. Further down the road is a forest so dense it’s like a wall—a combustible fuel ladder, ready to move a small ground fire into a canopy-level megafire in a flash.
For Tuolumne River Trust’s 2024 Impact Report, I conducted interviews and wrote seven person-centered impact stories. You can find them on pages 15, 17, and 18-22.
