Georgia Murray is the Air Quality Staff Scientist in Gorham, New Hampshire for the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC), a non-profit conservation and recreation organization.  She oversees AMC's ambient air pollution monitoring program in cooperation with the NH Department of Environmental Services, EPA and U.S. Forest Service.  She also works to advance science-based policy related to air quality for the club. Before joining AMC in August of 2000 she was a Research Scientist at the University of Washington where she conducted

biogeochemical monitoring and research at a small watershed site within Olympic National Park.  From 1992-1994 Ms. Murray was a Research Assistant at a Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) site, Toolik Lake, Alaska, with the Marine Biological Laboratory.  Her work there included investigating climate warming impacts on tundra soil processes and vegetation.  Ms. Murray received an MS degree in Earth Sciences from the University of NH in 1994.  She is a native of New Hampshire and currently resides in Conway, NH.

Mountain Watch: A hiker oriented citizen-science program to monitor plant phenology responses to climate change and air quality in the Appalachian Mountains

AMC's Mountain Watch program began in 2004 to educate the hiking community through their documentation of  air pollution (haze) impacts on visibility, hiker exposure to ozone and climate variability's influence on alpine plant phenology in the eastern Appalachian Mountains. From 2004 to 2006 data was collected from over 1,500 hikes and more than 5,000 hikers were engaged through the program. Mountain Watch's objectives are three-fold, i) to educate through active `citizen-science', hands-on monitoring in alpine and mid-elevation mountain ecosystems, ii) to engage the outdoor public in a manner that motivates them to take action towards natural resource stewardship, and iii) to meet pressing research data needs that would be to expensive to gather otherwise. In 2007 the program will focus on alpine and forest flower phenology monitoring starting in June, 'Flower Watch Month', as a vehicle to coordinate media efforts and obtain a pulse of consistent temporal data, and recruiting a more permanent volunteer base through 'Adopt-A-Peak' to obtain consistent geo-spatial information on mountain flower phenology and visibility.