Last Tuesday, I and three dozen of my Department of Interior coworkers from across New Mexico found ourselves back in the classroom. It could have been college. Except this was the office conference room, and our instructors were part of a cadre of retired BLMers and Forest Service folks sent to Carlsbad to give us a lesson in PFC. Proper Functioning Condition (PFC) is a tool for quickly assessing lentic and lotic, i.e. water-based, systems. While a lot of thought must go into completing the PFC, it’s actually a fairly straightforward list of 17 or 18 yes or no questions. What allows this simplicity is the team approach PFC takes. Each group must have at minimum a hydrologist, a vegetation expert, and a soils scientist. Discussion of each question is a must.

Wednesday continued the retro theme—field trip! Our interagency caravan went to apply our training at two sites along the Black and Delaware Rivers. My first thought was “goodness, I’m glad we have specialists with us.” Whether “floodplain above bankfull is inundated in ‘relatively frequent’ events” was beyond me. Our embedded instructor set the tone for a thorough discussion of each point, and though it was all I could do to follow the discussion at first, by the end of the second site I could advocate an opinion. And though I’m still no soil expert or hydrologist, I do have a feel for PFCs, a sense for the group dynamic and the considerations to bring to each question.

Since PFCs are conducted in the growing season and I have less than two months left in my internship, these assessments will not be the biggest takeaway from my CLM experience. Still, this training may prove valuable in the future. Riparian systems are a critical part of the landscape, and this assessment is not just BLM specific, but common to many resource management agencies. And as a final piece of good news, despite dire warnings about chiggers I came away from the training bite-free.