Dr Christina Young shares the shred lightly principles

Most of us will not be familiar with Biocrust, or "Fancy Dirt" as Dr Young likes to call it. The simplest way to explain it is a community of living entities that wrap themselves around the sand grains to hold the desert together. There is so much more to it than that, as this short movie below describes.
This layer is being disrupted by people recreating and travelling through the desert, as they are unaware of it's existence. When this happens, the sand of the desert becomes loose, and transportable by the wind. The interconnected desert and mountain ecosystems in Utah mean this dust lands on the snowpack, speeding up the melt. In order to bring attention to this issue, Dr Young has come up with her "Shred Lighly" principles.