Those Present: Tom Anderson, Keith Schoonover, Lori Schoonover, Dave Hunter, Dave Barrow, Bethany Dell'agnello, Dawne Howard, Drake Russell, Mike Kay

1. Call to order: Keith called the meeting to order.

2. Treasurer’s Report: Dave mentioned that we received a total of $.23 interest for July and August. Our ending balance was $5,423.97.

3. Logging site exams: Mike indicated that no plans were received during the month. We discussed Bruce’s work on developing a tutorial for the logging permit process directed towards landowners’ foresters, loggers, or anyone else that is interested in obtaining a logging permit. Bruce mentioned that he is working some of the kinks out of his article and it should be finished soon. Board members wish to thank Bruce for his work on this.

4. Tree walk: Bethany mentioned that she is working with Susan Simonson of Hood College and Becky Wilson of the MD Forest Service to include some trees from Hood’s campus into the walk. Susan has been extremely helpful and has even donated $150 of her own money to help purchase tree labels for the new trees. Bethany also made contact with The Frederick County Board of Education to include the large elm at Frederick High but their requirement for us to provide liability insurance for anybody who would visit the tree is too onerous. Bethany also mentioned that she will write Nature Notes articles for all of the new trees on the walk.

5. PR Activities: Dave has been looking at some of the analytics for the Web Page and noticed that we tend to receive more visits directly following some PR activities. The Image Library PR event resulted in an average increase of 23 to 50 views per week.

6. FRO: Tom mentioned that Frederick County has proposed an increase of 25 feet to riparian buffers for new subdivisions." (This proposal is being voted on Wednesday, September 16, 2020. Tom also mentioned that Sonia is working on Frederick County’s Climate Change working group being part of the PR committee. Tom is also working on the Agriculture – Forestry working group with this initiative.

7. Nature Notes: Lori mentioned we have received a number of new articles recently which she intends to send to Sue. As per Dave “As of 9/14/20 the News Post has 15 Nature Notes articles.

8. Website: As per the analytic research Dave notes: The webpage that gets the most views is the Tree Walk Series averaging 17 per week. The latest news release increased our views from 23 to 50 per week. The past week Nature Notes on snake sightings was our most popular Nature Note of the year with 914 people reading it. Our most popular page in the past had 632 views. Dave updated the site to show an Eastern Hop Hornbeam on the opening page.