Grace Kellner
We did not have class on Wednesday of this week, but I went to the meeting on Tuesday. On Friday, everybody was out in the field either collecting samples or collecting data from about 2:00 to 5:00. Allyn Fuell was there to help myself and Gray with our HGM plots and to help me get a handle on tree identification. The first plot took about an hour to complete once we got it set up. There were only a few dominant species in that plot. Then we set up a second plot in a more bottomland area and that one only took about 45 minutes to do. The rest of the groups had moved on to different locations, so we went to see when they were and when they were leaving. We had just enough time to set up a plot in the degraded area. Gray's HGM assessment only took a few seconds because most of his data was 0 and mine was a lot faster as well because Allyn helped identify the number of different grass and forb species in a square meter plot.
Saturday morning a group went out early to collect data. I went out later with my father (a biologist at ATU) and Allyn. Everything went a lot faster because I knew how to set up the plots and could identify the species more easily. My dad and I did the last plot in the Sample 1 location, the last two in the degraded, and all three in the sample 2 location. Allyn was only able to come out for the latter part of our trip, but helped us identify two tree species that I of course didn't know and my dad was unsure about. She also took samples of some of the grasses back with her so she could identify the species for me. I feel like I can do the rest of the points on my own as long as I have a guidebook to help me with the difficult species. It might also be interesting to come back once the trees have leaves on them at the end of the semester to sample again to see if our identifications without leaves were accurate. In total, on Saturday I was in the field from 2:00 to 5:30.
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