A tree planted this fall has two jobs. It has to live through its first August, and the group that planted it has to prove to a funder that it did. River Network and Anthropocene Alliance (A2) have built a five-week webinar series around both jobs, and anyone can sit in.
River Network and A2 are hosting five online sessions on climate resilience and adaptation, every Thursday at 3 p.m. Eastern from October 22 through November 19. The topics came straight from the groups River Network funds through its Urban and Community Forestry grants: monitoring and grant compliance, disaster-ready tree planting, cleaning up pollution with plants and fungi, buffer zones, and community land trusts. The series is free and open to anyone, and people can register for one session or all five.
Built from the questions people actually asked
Most webinar series start with what the host wants to say. This one started with what grantees kept asking. River Network’s Urban and Community Forestry grantees told the organization where they were stuck, and River Network and A2 turned those sticking points into a schedule. That is the practical way to do it, and it shows in the list.
Every session starts at 3 p.m. Eastern, noon on the West Coast.
October 22: Monitoring Your Projects. Ecological and grant compliance approaches. In plain terms: how to show that the work is working, to the funder and to yourself.
October 29: Tree Planting and Disaster Planning. Designing plantings that hold up when the climate does what it has been doing lately.
November 5: Ecological Remediation. Using plants and fungi to pull pollutants out of soil and water (phytoremediation and mycoremediation, for anyone who wants the terms).
November 12: Buffer Zones. Strips of trees and plants that catch runoff and soften storms before either reaches a stream or a street.
November 19: Community Land Trusts. A model that keeps land, and the decisions about it, in the hands of the people who live there.
One free session a week at 3 p.m. Eastern, October 22 through November 19. Register for the ones that fit.
The unglamorous one comes first
Here is the problem with grant-funded planting, and it is a silly one when said out loud. The planting day gets the photos, the volunteers and the newsletter story. The monitoring that follows gets a spreadsheet nobody wants to open. Yet the monitoring is what decides whether the next grant comes through, and whether anyone learns why a third of the saplings did not make it.
So the series opens on monitoring and compliance, which is the right call. It is the part of a project that never makes the flyer, and the part that most often trips up small groups running on volunteers and one part-time coordinator.
Worth saying plainly: these are webinars, not field days. Nobody learns to stake a sapling over a video call. What a good hour online can do is save a group from repeating someone else’s expensive mistake.
Why it matters for the rest of us
Almost every topic on this schedule is already a live project somewhere in the Upper Ohio basin. Streamside buffers (riparian buffers) along the Yough, the Casselman and the small runs that feed the Mon are some of the cheapest flood and water quality insurance the region has. Plant and fungus based cleanup speaks to a basin still living with legacy mine drainage and old industrial ground. And partner plantings, like the 19 trees and shrubs that recently went in at Waynesburg University, only pay off if they survive the next downpour and the dry spell after it.
The first session is this Thursday, October 22, at 3 p.m. Watershed groups with a planting grant open right now have the most to gain from that one.
Register Now: First Session October 22
Details come from a River Network announcement of its webinar series with Anthropocene Alliance, forwarded to H2O Water Network on October 19, 2026. Current as of October 19, 2026.
