Week 7 - The Start of Veg Season

I now see why everyone has been warning me about vegetation survey field work. It is not a walk in the park. It is difficult field work, long hours in the hot and humid Louisiana swamps. We did one site on Monday and it was the hardest. I am glad it got it out the way. CRMS site 0090 will forever be my enemy. Solid ground did not exist as we pushed through chest deep thick mud to obtain our data. My job was to measure diameter at breast height, DBH, of the trees in each plot. Each site had three plots in which we collected data from.

 I also used a densitometer to estimate canopy cover of each site. This was a convex mirror that had small squares, four corners, and wherever trees did not touch one of the corners you would count that as one. Numbers were collected from the north, east, south, and west directions in each plot.

Understory and herbivorous data was also collected from each plot in the sites. I helped record this data. All aspects of the data collection taught me a lot about the vegetation throughout the Louisiana swamp.

While eating lunch one day we happened to make an alligator friend. I posted a picture below, he/she is camouflaged so it is hard to see at first. I do not want my opening comments to sound as if I was complaining. It was hard, but I had a fun time being out in the swamp and learning. Even though I switched majors does not mean I lost my overall interest in our natural world. I am happy with what I am doing and excited for the next week of vegetation surveys.