Scientific field work - equipment attrition

Field work is hard on both the researchers and the equipment. TPP's back is not getting any younger. One of the adventures each spring is to discover all of the "equipment" you and your students lost the previous year. Now please understand that the reason this becomes apparent each spring when your field site is a prairie is that hidden things appear after the prairie has been burned.  Now herein lies the real problem: lost items are now easy to find, but following a prairie burn, they may not be in primo condition any more. Last year was a tough year. Several wooden meter sticks were lost, a couple of pairs of sunglasses, countless pencils, ballpoint pens, although one still worked quite well (Yeah Bic), and permanent markers just went missing, as well as a couple of compasses that lost their way. Well, here's the compasses, a bit on the toasty

side, but still quite functional as paper weights or as specimens for demonstrating to students the consequences of carelessness while doing field work. Ah, well, plastic components have their limitations.

Hot prairie research

Yesterday was a beautiful November day here in the upper midwest. On Monday last our prairie study site was burned, a fall rather than a spring burn. The reason for this hinges on observed differences in time of seed dispersal for two species, a native and an invasive bush clover. The invasive bush clover tends to hang onto its seed very late in the season, so how much of its reproductive potential will get damaged by a fall burn? The answer to this question will probably be not enough, but you never know until to try it and determine the answer for certain. So yesterday we collected seed from scortched clovers and from the litter that tends to accumulate under dense stands of the invasive clover, and in another month or so, after a cold treatment, germination trials will be set up. No matter how toasty the whole place looks, none of these herbaceous perennials are damaged by these fires, so the parent plants will not be harmed. Now in a side story the Phactor was driving the F1's slick silver coupe because it was making a "noise". It's a very nice late model ride, but not exactly cut out for field work. Please understand that after spending a couple of hours out on a recently burned prairie, you get pretty blackened from the knees down, rather smoky flavored, although not as smoky as doing the actual burn, and you have dirty bags of plant material. The good news is that this particular sport coupe has good traction in the mud and made nary a wayward sound. The smoky odor should fade in a few days, but too bad about the floor mats. Shhh! Don't tell!

Spring at my Study Site

Spring, when a man's fancy turns to field work. And here's what a small portion of the Phactor's study site, a far corner actually, looks like in early spring. Nothing like a well-charred prairie to let you know it's going to be a good year for field work. The new transects won't be hard to find now, but last fall the stakes were quite well hidden by the tall grass vegetation. Finding a hundred or so individual plots only marked by a metal tag at the corner is another matter completely; hard when the prairie is burned, impossible when it isn't. This prairie will turn green very quickly, and the work will begin. Thank goodness for students and their nice young backs. This is a good place to break in those nice new white athletic shoes.

Joys of Field Work - the most recent chapter

Fire is part of the ecology of grasslands although most residents of the prairie state do not know this because most of the prairie has been converted into the maize and soybean desert. For those of us who study some of the little patches of remaining prairie, fire is an important management tool because it keeps many invasive species, particularly woody plants, in check. So why the hell was my prairie not burned? The excuse was economics and personnel, not enough money, so not enough people to manage the burn. However, since the burning was scheduled the PVC posts that provide an early season marker for locating my study plots were removed leaving only an iron spike driven into the ground and an aluminum ID tag. Because of the particular experimental design these plots, 108 of them across a 6 acre area, were not laid out in a regular grid, but in random groupings of 9. Generally speaking after the fire these tags are not too difficult to find, and after locating 7 or 8 in each group, the remaining ones’ location(s) can then be triangulated. But the prairie was not burned so now all these tags are out there at ground level somewhere in a tangle of last year’s vegetation that easily reached 9-10 feet tall and this year’s new aerial shoots. Finding all the plots is proving next to impossible even with the help of a metal detector and maps of the groups. And metal detectors designed to find a cufflink on a fairway are not so easily used in the jungle of vegetation down there. Think this isn't costing some money and personnel time? Miss by an inch and you won’t see the tag. Oh, yes, the temptation to drop a match and blame it on a passing smoker was very strong.