trees, shrubs, grass
Yay! The truck has started for a consecutive three days straight now. Quite an achievement. We even managed to get out and do field research yesterday which was a novelty. Hopefully it becomes the norm. Now, to explain a little bit further what Luke and I spend many of our days doing (or hope to be doing) here is a short explanation –
Based on meeting with communities and asking them about the different land-uses in their are we then go out to specific spots on the landscape (with some community members) and ask them how and why these areas are useful for agriculture, cattle, settlement, and grazing. The areas vary widely in type of land cover and it’s interesting to hear the responses as to why an area might be good or bad for a specific land use type. We then mark the spot to come back and do a vegetation transect later.
The other aspect of it is to identify areas in the community where really dense shrub exists to see if those areas can be separated on a satellite image from other land cover types. Now, we’ve come up with a very scientific means of defining dense shrub cover which I think would totally hold up under peer review:
Criteria –
- Impossible to do a transect
- Inevitably will get stuck by something whether thorn or sticky grass
- Get to practice shuffle squats
- Need constant vigilance for the ticks climbing up pants leg
- Expletives increase exponentially
- Luke’s hat gets caught on something
- Irrational to move around for canopy estimates
I feel like we are moving along quite nicely…