(bright music) - [Host] Minnesota is rich in natural resources.

Our lakes, streams, forests and grasslands provide habitat for native species and recreational opportunities for people of all ages and skill levels.

To protect these valuable resources, the State of Minnesota directs 40% of the state's lottery proceeds to the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, which has awarded a billion dollars to 2,400 projects that protect, conserve, and enhance Minnesota's natural resources.

The Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund was created by a Minnesota Constitutional Amendment in 1988 to provide a long-term stable source of funding for environmental protections and enhancements.

Every year, about 5% of those funds are available to spend on environmental projects recommended by the Legislative Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources and voted on by the state legislature.

Every county in Minnesota has been impacted.

Many of these projects have been featured on Prairie Sportsmen, an outdoor show produced by Pioneer PBS for all Minnesota PBS stations.

Here are highlights of those stories from the past six years.

Funding from the Environment and Natural Resources Trust fund is reintroducing and protecting native wildlife species and their habitats.

Freshwater mussels that once covered Minnesota lake and riverbeds were almost wiped out in the early 1900s by pearl hunters, button makers and pollution.

- The reason we care about 'em at all is because they filter the water and they remove particles from the water and they consume things like E. coli bacteria that are in the rivers.

- [Host] 28 of Minnesota's 51 native mussel species are endangered, threatened, or of special concern.

The DNR is raising native mussels and labs and reintroducing them in streams where they have disappeared, including a Cannon River tributary in southeast Minnesota where Mike Davis and his crew reintroduced muckets, a native mussel species.

- Free the mussels!

They've been stuck in that nasty little basket for two years.

- The muckets, mucket babies.

Goodbye, all right.

The muckets are back, the muckets are back!

- [Host] Native mussels were successfully removed from the Pomme de Terre River when it was rerouted from its entrance into Marsh Lake to its original channel into the Minnesota River.

Three years later, River E Colleges found a thriving population had come back to the tributary.

Dakota Skipper butterflies once flourished in upper Midwest prairies from Chicago to Saskatchewan, but their home turf of forests and grasses gave way to development and the diminutive skipper disappeared from all but a few sites in the Dakotas and one in Minnesota.

To reestablish Dakota Skipper populations, the butterflies being raised at the Minnesota Zoo and released in Minnesota native prairies.

- Ultimately, we wanna put ourselves out of a job by being so successful that these butterflies no longer need our help.

We wanna be able to then contribute towards what is needed to keep them in the wild.

The reintroductions that we're doing with that Hole in the Mountain Prairie Preserve to kind of really kind of create that cookbook of what is needed to keep them alive in the wild long term and remove them from those protections that are needed right now.

- [Host] Bison that roamed the American plains came to the brink of extinction in the 1800s.

Efforts to return bison to the plains started in 1907 when the Bronx Zoo released 15 in an Oklahoma preserve.

Those efforts continue today at the Minnesota Zoo where pure bred bison have been raised and released in blue mounds and Minneopa state parks.

The DNR and zoo remove animals from these herds that they detect cattle DNA, which is in most Minnesota bison.

Now they're working to diversify genetics by bringing in purebred bulls and frozen embryos from national parks like Yellowstone, Badlands and Teddy Roosevelt.

Trust fund dollars support the development of tools to detect and combat chronic wasting disease in deer.

- I think Minnesota has been really aggressive in their testing really since 2002.

That was the first time it was found in the wild in Wisconsin, and the first time we found it in captive servants in Minnesota.

Other states might have not been as fortunate or didn't have the resources to look consistently and more were reactionary when one was found for the first time, say maybe a roadkill that was positive.

I think Minnesota has been on the cutting edge of trying to find this disease for well over a decade, almost two.

- [Host] And in southeast Minnesota, the fund is helping save wood turtles that are threatened by habitat loss and degradation.

DNR researchers are removing eggs from nests and taking them to the Minnesota Zoo where turtles are raised to one year juveniles then released to their original nesting sites.

- Raccoons, birds, skunks, foxes, you name it, love to feast on turtle eggs and hatchling turtles.

So it just gives a better chance to get past that most vulnerable stage and release them, yeah, that year later.

And that just helps boost the population.

So the population is facing a number of threats, habitat loss, climate change, road mortality.

So this is just buying us some time to keep the populations going as we address those other problems.

- We know what turtles are indicators of quality of rivers.

They need rivers that don't have a lot of siltation and they need well oxygenated rivers in terms of places to over winter.

We know if wood turtles are declining that there is something going on in the landscape to be causing that.

- [Host] Many native species depend on healthy ecosystems to survive and thrive.

Of Minnesota's nine woodpecker species, only redheaded woodpeckers are in decline.

0.01% of Minnesota's native oak savanna remains and redheads need that habitat to thrive.

The species depend on dead and dying trees to carve out nests and a savanna's open space to forage.

- I think often of woodpeckers as being species that drill holes in trees and kind of go after an insects in dead wood.

This species actually doesn't do that.

I've seen them grab a live grasshopper and a a live cicada and fly with them through the air, the cicadas are screaming and then just kind of shove them under a piece of bark.

- Elena West conducted her initial studies at the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve, which is one of two Minnesota locations with large populations of redheaded woodpeckers.

Through a grant from the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, Cedar Creek started bringing in bison during the growing season.

Bison eat grasses that compete with small oak trees, which helps restore the savanna.

Prescribed burns are also an effective tool for restoring natural habitats, especially prairies and wetlands.

Fire eliminates shallow rooted invasive species, but doesn't harm the deep roots of native plants and trees.

Habitat restoration can start at home with programs like Lawns2Legumes.

Funded by the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, and designed by the Minnesota Board of Water and Soil Resources, Lawns2Legumes was launched in 2019 with three main components: $350 cost share grants to help residents with native plantings, large demonstration neighborhood grants of up to $40,000, and online education to help anyone design pollinator-friendly yards.

Dana Boyle of Woodbury learned about the Lawns2Legumes program when she volunteered at the Minnesota State Fair's blue thumb booth.

- I really got to know a lot more and I became inspired so I thought, how can I bring this back to my own garden?

It was obvious that first year that the flowering plants came around that there are way more pollinators.

But last year it was really exciting.

I saw my first rusty patch bumblebees.

They were coming on the red monarda and that was so exciting knowing that they are an endangered species and very rare.

- These projects can be really rich sources of pollen and nectar.

We have around 450 species of native bees, but there's butterflies and moss and beetles and hummingbirds, lots of different pollinators that can be benefited.

The more of these projects we have across different areas, the more insects we can benefit.

- [Host] Water quality is important to Minnesotans living in the land of almost 16,000 lakes and more than 6,500 rivers and streams.

The Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund invests in research into pollutants and invasive species that could harm our precious water resources.

Trust fund dollars are invested in much of the St. Croix watershed research stations work.

The world renowned center tests lake sediment cores from across Minnesota and other countries to evaluate water quality.

Researchers there are also investigating why invasive species are showing up in places they've never been seen before.

Toxic blue-green algae blooms are typically found in waters polluted with nutrient runoff, but they've been discovered in Isle Royal National Park, a protected island on Lake Superior and didymo, known as rock snot, is showing up in northeast Minnesota streams.

- The organism that makes this snot is a type of algae that is called a diatom.

It's about a 10th of a millimeter long, so you can't see it with the naked eye unless it grows in these big, huge masses and then it looks like snot.

These diatoms, didymosphenia, lives on a big mucilage stock.

The diatom might be this long, but the stock that it produces is this long.

What they're trying to do is they're living on a rock and they're trying to get up to where the water is best and full of oxygen.

But to do that, they just have to keep growing.

It has lived fairly happily on the shore of Lake Superior and people don't notice it too much.

So the crazy thing that's happened in Minnesota is this is the first time we've seen it in streams in Minnesota, is these invasions of our North shore streams here.

- [Host] The trust fund is supporting multiple projects at the Minnesota Aquatic Invasive Species Research Center such as testing copper pesticides on zebra mussels and locating where spiny water fleas have invaded Minnesota lakes to stop their spread.

Water quality is also impacted by modern pollutants entering our waterways, such as microplastics that result from plastic breaking down or chipping off into small particles.

University of Minnesota researchers have found microplastics in all 12 brands of beer they tested brewed with water coming from the Great Lakes.

Plastic particles shed into our diets when we rip open a plastic package, pop ice cubes out of an old tray or drink from a throwaway bottle, and researchers are looking at how this might impact our health as well as wildlife and the environment.

- I went around to different grocery stores to buy different types of salts and this one has a grinding mechanism here.

So talk about like how packaging can contribute.

The grinding mechanism is made out of plastic so just the act of grinding the salt like this, you're probably adding little tiny bits of plastic with your salt.

- [Host] Prairie Sportsman's salty water story reveals damage that is being caused by sodium chloride in our lakes and streams.

- The University of Minnesota did a study back in 2008 and they estimated the purchases of salt used for DIC purposes is about 365,000 tons per year, is how much we're putting down in the Twin Cities metro area.

And they found that about 78% of the chloride or salt that is being put onto our roads and our parking lots and our sidewalks is making its way into our local streams and our lakes and our wetlands, and of course groundwater as well.

It takes one teaspoon of salt and a five gallon bucket of water to start to have negative impacts on the aquatic community.

So while rain gardens and stormwater ponds and all of these great infiltration type best management practices that we have designed and implemented over the years to help clean our storm water, they do not do anything to remove chloride.

So it's going to stay with that water essentially forever.

It's not toxic to humans, but it is toxic to aquatic life.

So the fish, the insects, the plants living in our lakes and our streams are very sensitive to chloride in Minnesota.

- [Host] Another story features University of Minnesota research into plants that could absorb harmful salts along roadsides.

- So these plants have to be really hardy.

They ideally grow really quickly so they can outcompete these more weed-like species that will grow on roadsides and take up salt effectively and not have too much maintenance while we're planting these and harvesting them.

- If you look at a typical roadside, you've got the first flush off the shoulder, and that's the space that I think is most valuable to capture salt before it even gets to the ditch, gets to the receiving water or to the wetland is doing that first flush capture.

It's the easiest to manage.

We mow it anyway.

For snow management, we don't want drifting snow on the road if you can avoid it.

So it's a very good place.

- [Host] The Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund supports a development of agricultural practices that are good for the environment such as cover crops, conservation tillage and breeding perennial crops like kernza with deep roots that prevent soil erosion.

- Kernza is on track to becoming the world's first commercial perennial grain crop.

It's a cousin of wheat, it's a grain crop, produces edible seeds by humans and it's perennial so you plant it once and it continues to come back year after year, producing seed.

- Compared to annual wheat and the grass is higher in protein, which is great and higher in dietary fiber and a lot of phytochemicals that have been shown to be beneficial to the human diet.

By relaying the information between the food scientists and agronomists, we can go towards breeding a superior or at least marketable and desirable crop.

- Once I learned about it, it just was a perfect fit for what our mission is to tell the story of our food and where it comes from.

We cooked it up and featured it in some whole grain deli salads.

We also put it into waffles and pancakes.

So about five years ago, we were invited by the Minnesota Farmer Union to partner with them with their coffee shop at the state fair.

- When we first brewed with it, we were cautioned and said it's a little earthy and a little grassy and it might not be the best grain and beers.

I think collectively everybody was stunned and really happy that the flavor profile's fantastic.

- [Host] At the University of Minnesota Morris, researchers are developing printable solar cells made from agricultural byproducts such as corn cobs.

They're printed in sheets and work like solar panels, but are thin, flexible, and low cost so they could be installed on roofs or small structures where panels would be too heavy such as state park solar cell phone charging stations.

- In specifically today's materials are coming from fossil fuels like petroleum.

So what we need to do is think about replacing fossil fuels with more sustainable approaches.

And one of the best sustainable approaches is to use biomass or plant-based materials that are readily abundant and sustainable.

Throughout the Midwest, we produce a lot of plant material and the approach that we're taking is don't use the edible part of the plant, but rather the byproduct so there's no sort of food competition that we're trying to get into.

We're simply focusing on the inedible part of the plant.

- [Host] Other Morris researchers are testing autonomous mowers that can remove weeds and livestock pastures.

Cows graze grass believe weeds like thistle and burdock that need to be removed every few years.

The remote control mower is easier to operate than a tractor mower in rough and rocky fields full of gopher mounds.

- It's just like you're seeing cars, Tesla having an autopilot mode and I think in five to 10 years, it's gonna be pretty common to see actually vehicles driving autonomously on highway.

So it's not a too big a stretch to imagine a mower.

People already have Roombas in their house and a robot, an autonomous vacuum cleaner.

There's a similar type of vehicle for mowing your yard, a residential yard.

So there's a few benefits, one we kind of talked about.

You're saving a lot of farmer's labor.

Generally, especially typically, a dairy farmer is gonna have a lot more valuable things they could be doing with their time rather than mowing a pasture.

Yet if you're grazing, it's a task that that needs to be done.

So you're accomplishing that task, saving that labor.

We're also doing this with solar energy.

So we're lowering the carbon footprint for that dairy farmer and milk in general.

- [Host] Bringing people into a closer view and understanding of wildlife is made possible by grants from the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund.

A million dollar investment in the International Wolf Center in Ely greatly improved and expanded the center's exhibits offering visitors and immersion into the lives of gray wolves.

- In the early eighties, the Science Museum of Minnesota came to me and wanted to build a wolf exhibit and they wanted the ideas.

So I pulled out this report where I had outlined a lot of ideas for if somebody did start something like this and they went with those ideas and built this wolves and humans exhibit, which was very popular.

It got sent around to six or eight different venues, American Museum of Natural History, National Geographic of Washington, that kind of thing.

And then when the exhibit was done, the museum asked if should we take it apart and any ideas for this?

I said, yeah, let's build a wolf center because now we have actually the guts of it and opened the Wolf Center in 1993.

- [Host] More than 40,000 people from around the world enter the Wolf Center every year to better understand the most misunderstood carnivore in North America.

One of the new exhibits, Discover Wolves, helps people get past their fears to view wolves from the eyes of research.

- You can watch video that was actually taken inside of a wolf den in Voyager National Park so you can see wolf pup development.

You can also learn about how far wolves travel.

They're amazing dispersers.

- [Host] The trust fund expanded educational programs offered by the Raptor Center in St. Paul, which was founded by University of Minnesota veterinary professors in the 1970s to treat injured birds.

Some of the birds that could not be returned to the wild became ambassadors.

- So Max came to us in her hatch year so her first year of life and she had a dislocated elbow in her wing.

She also had lead poisoning and once we healed up the elbow and treated the lead poisoning, she couldn't fly well enough to be able to survive in the wild and she has kind of the right mental attitude to become part of the team.

So for the last 22 years, she has been a valuable part of the team educating people about bald eagles.

We go into schools and fairs and festivals and all sorts of different settings to use the power of the live bird to educate and inspire the public.

- [Host] University of Minnesota researchers are also studying why fox and coyote populations are increasing in urban areas.

- What we see with coyotes is they seem to select more of the green spaces and so they'll try to avoid people.

And their avoidance in these green spaces kind of gives an opportunity to foxes to get away from coyotes in the more heavily human-used landscapes.

We're gonna have to get used to coyotes and foxes being around 'cause both of these animals are throughout these areas.

- [Host] The Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund is improving our access to the outdoors, including improvements to the Casey Jones Trail that was the first to be dedicated as a Minnesota State Trail in 1967, but it stopped short of what friends of the trail envisioned.

- We have over 600 plus miles of paved trail in the state of Minnesota, yet southwest Minnesota, we only see 14.

This is the trail Minnesota forgot.

It was in 2005, we actually put together a master plan.

We wanna be consistently getting money and funding so that we can realize our vision of we have 100 mile vision to Redwood Falls.

In the 2021 LCCMR funding, DNR received $840,000 to rehabilitate the north segment of the Currie loop trail and we received $700,000 to continue and pave the last final two miles to Woodstock.

- [Host] Funds are building fishing piers throughout Minnesota that are accessible to youth, people with disabilities and anyone who may not have access to a boat.

Minnesota Trout Unlimited has received trust fund monies for its work nurturing and appreciation of the outdoors and water stewardship through its youth classroom education, field studies and fly fishing mentorship program foster the outdoors.

The volunteer run program starts in May when youth and their guardians meet up with mentors at Phalen Park in St. Paul.

- We're adults who know some stuff and we want to share it with you.

You guys are the mentees.

That means your kids who wanna learn some stuff, make sense?

So really our secret mission here is to get these young people digging this, really into it, and then they become the next generation of us, people who care enough about the resource to make sure it's protected.

- [Host] Trust Fund dollars are providing scholarships for underserved students to attend environmental learning centers like Osprey Wilds in East central Minnesota.

- We've Got biological and geological classes, ecological classes.

We have adventure classes, wildlife energy, cultural studies of the inhabitants to this area.

They get to be immersed here in nature with their classmates and their teachers and see a whole new leaf to those relationships and develop a much tighter bond than they might get just by being in the same setting at school for months at a time.

- Grants to these projects and hundreds more were carefully reviewed and vetted by the Legislative Citizen Commission on Minnesota resources through a competitive multi-step selection process.

The commission is composed of five senators, five representatives, and seven citizens appointed by the governor and the legislature.

Those citizens must have experience or expertise in natural resources and conservation science, policy or practice.

The LCCMR makes annual project funding recommendations to the Minnesota legislature for projects that protect and enhance our world and make the outdoors more accessible for us all to enjoy.

Thanks a billion, Minnesota, for making possible the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund and the legislative citizen commission on Minnesota resources.

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