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<br />JM: Hey, aloha everyone. <br /> <br />LT: Aloha… <br /> <br />JM: Can you guys all hear me? <br /> <br />AA: Yeah. <br /> <br />JM: \[Technical difficulties\] So, yeah, I just wanted to join in today to talk story about the Kohala Eke <br />Project, this is up mauka of Kohala Mountain Road – it takes place on Queen Emma Land <br />Company Property so it’s private land, but I figured it’d be good to bring to this gathering <br />because it’s directly adjacent to public hunting area and adjacent to Parker Ranch land, this is <br />just a subset of my slide show that I’ve presented at other Eke community talk story sessions in <br />Waimea, so I just kept it really brief, I didn’t want to take up too much time today, but if there’s <br />any questions I can try to answer them as fast as possible after these slides. There’s, only about <br />3 or 4 slides so they’ll be real brief. All right, so as you can see from the map here that I’ve put <br />on the slide, everything in purple is Queen Emma Land Company, and then the watershed <br />boundaries are marked in that kind of cyan color and the orange areas are all DLNR public <br />hunting area, and then you can also make out some roads in black, the Eke Project area is <br />highlighted in yellow – that’s the perimeter of the project site and the project – the main goals <br />are to protect one of the highest quality leeward cloud forests of Kohala. There’s not a whole <br />lot of native cloud forests left in Kohala because of all the impact from human and animal over <br />the last couple hundred years so most of the leeward slope of Kohala has been deforested and <br />there’s very little high quality forest left. So, the Eke Project is meant to remove a bunch of <br />invasive species including Himalayan ginger, banana poka, and feral pigs. I just want to remind <br />everyone that this is like probably some of the best forest remaining in Kohala and it’s where a <br />lot of our water comes from. It goes down through our streams Keawewai Stream is just one of <br />the streams that comes through the unit and starts in the unit. And it’s used by folks down slope <br />including ranches and private landowners along the way as well as down into near Kailapa <br />Hawaiian Homes community, which there’s been some talk about – in the past there’s been <br />some talk about how do you better utilize that water if its cleaner. So it’s just a really amazing <br />part of Kohala. There’s a couple other streams that come out of that area and we’ve been <br />actually researching – I’m trying to find the historic names for those but they’re so small that <br />either the names have been lost over time or we just haven’t found them in old maps or talking <br />to Kupuna are knowledgeable of those streams, um, so we’ve been naming them Kawaihae 1, <br />Kawaihae 2 – now – just as placeholder names, we’re going to be doing water quality <br />monitoring throughout the project, prior to the fences being installed as well as after and after <br />the ungulate removal and ginger removal. As you can see the Project goals are: protect the <br />forest, remove the invasive species, monitor the change and secure that clean water source. Ah, <br />this is just another map of the unit from a closer in perspective, as you can see there’s, you <br />know, a fair chunk of forest remaining in Kohala and anything that’s on the southwest side of <br />that north boundary – that’s all considered leeward slope, cause that northeast boundary in <br />yellow there – that is almost directly on top of the ridge of Kohala, and I wanted to point out <br />some of the landmarks that you can sometimes see from places like Kawaihae or Waikoloa – off <br />to the upper left corner of the map – up in this area – that’s Pu’u ahia and that pu’u is somewhat <br />visible from a bunch of different places on the west side of the Island. And the Project is named <br />9 <br /> <br /> <br />