Wonderful...

So... yeah.

The gravel roads here are definitely like driving over ball bearings. The road turned slightly at the top of the hill, and bumps in the road generated a washboard-effect. These factors together with maybe breaking a bit to fast soon sent my back end fish-tailing until I was perpendicular to the road. I continued to slide down, and as I approached the forest that was once to my right, but now in front of me, I just closed my eyes and held onto the wheel thinking "but this can't happen to me". Amazingly, I didn't get one scratch. My first reaction was complete frustration. As calmed down a few seconds later I realized what had happened. I noticed that the road was far and hidden behind a forest of trees and shrubs. I attempted to open the door, and although the door handle was invitingly stuck out in the open position, nothing would move. So, since my window was down, I climbed out.


Among the trees and shrubs I took with me, an eight inch Quercus coccinea was bent in half, ten feet behind where the car came to rest. There were also many Cornus florida in woods around me. Altogether, I probably plowed through about thirty feet of dense forest.

Basic gear

These are some of the basic tools for surveying a quad.
- Meter^2 wooden frame
- Field computer for recording data
- Field book with pictures and notes about identifying the plants
- Personal notebook with notes about identifying the plants

Not in the picture:
- Compass for orienting the wooden frames and finding the quads
- Handlens to help with identifying plants
- Densiometer (a curved mirror used to estimate canopy coverage)
- Extra hot-pink flaging tape for marking old plots
- GPS device for finding the plots in the first place

Work is in full swing

The first few weeks of official training are over, and plot surveying has begun. Three others and I leave at seven each morning and get back at five in the evening. We begin our day by looking at a map of the plots we have to survey, and then program them into a GPS unit that will direct us to them. The plots are scattered at various sites in the Ozark forests. Each plot has four subplots, and each subplot has four quadrants. A quadrant is the square meter from which we survey plants and other data. Thus far together we have only been able to complete a maximum of four plots a day, which is about sixteen square meters of survey per person. We could definitely do more in one day, but this last week has been a series of severe thunderstorms and tornadoes that have cut our outside work by a few hours a day. While inside, we mounted herbarium specimens and studied new plants. To help us work faster, we are each given a field computer that we enter the data into from each quadrant. This includes the canopy coverage, the dead woody debris, the percent vegetation cover and the individual species of plants found.

I must say that repetitively identifying plants and writing out their Latin names is a surefire way of learning botany. Although it is quite exhausting, I am very pleased with this job and look forward to see how much this aids me with the Northeastern flora.