Wednesday, May 28, 2008

What a weekend

So, weekend before last we had a super-major all-out research-prep fest.
It was awesome. The weather was great, eighties, not too hot under the gracious forest canopy. Lovely violets sparkled like flecks of gold in the green and brown sea of the forest floor. Vine maple vivid green as its new leaves unfold and soak up the light; skunk cabbage the size of small child, streams swollen with the sudden snow melt singing across our path and flooding the way with their mad dance.

I had mighty plans of getting every plot reestablished for the summer course. We came close. I suppose I can't really complain that I have to spend another day out in the woods, watching the salmon berries finish their blooms and getting to know that neck of the woods just a little better.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

oh man!

So we had our presentations tonight at the Olympic Park Visitor's Center. I have to say, all the groups did very well. I think that the community members were also surprised and impressed at the graduate level of research going on at our "2 year community college". Most of the questions seemed rather informed, and it is always refreshing to be reminded how much of our community likes to be involved in educational programs and environmental restoration projects such as this. Pretty great for a small town.

All in all, I feel we left a very positive impact in the minds of our audience, on behalf of our small part in the research being done with the damn removal and on behalf of the advancements as Peninsula College.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

This weekend: relocation bonanza!

Hey there!

This weekend a fellow researcher on the Rainy Creek project and I are going to make a weekend of it: we're heading out on Saturday and am going to camp out over the weekend, hopefully getting all the plots in the treatment areas found and flagged.

Anyone's welcome!

Thursday, May 1, 2008

A plan

As I just mentioned, at long last all the data crunching and map making is completed. Sadly this took way longer that it ought to have, so now all we have is one month to get the prep field work done before the summer class starts.

What we are going to do is go out into the Rainy Creek area out west, armed with trusty compass, map, metal detector and reams of flagging. Our goal is simple: find the plots, mark them clearly, very clearly

One thing I found when trying to locate plots last fall and earlier this spring is that no amount of flagging can really be too much in the woods. Somehow, plots keep on vanishing, trees fall on them, the flagging gets eaten or taken away by strange magic kritturs, maybe hunters took the marks to brighten themselves up in a pinch... All I know is that it was gone, and we were damned lucky to have found anything.

So, if anyone has a free day this month and wants a fun romp in the woods marking up plots, let me know! I'll make some tea!

At last!

It is done! After much pain and hours of bitterness, I finally have my map done! It was originally created in a program no longer supported by the college, and which is no longer installed on any computers... I had to call in a favor from a friend to get it transfered into countless shape files, which I could then put in ArcView.... However; when I brought it in, all the geographic data was all hosed up, so it ended up in the great lakes instead of Sol Duc!

Though the help of one of the ARC teachers at PC, I was able to develop a method for tricking the program into storing them with the location data (for some reason it kept giving us error messages when we tried to do it in all the normal and customary ways).

Anyways, it is done!
Now that we can see what mapping was actually done last summer, we can move on to the field work. Its about time.