The First Installation

Earlier today we installed plots at our first study site. It was super cool to actually be on the ground, working in the field sites that I had only seen on aerial photos. Within each treatment (grazed grassland, grazed forest, ungrazed grassland - inside the exclosure, and ungrazed forest - also inside the exclosure) we installed PVC pipe to mark the sampling grid that we'll be returning to later to sample the vegetation.

Here you can see the PVC pipe in the grazed grassland treatment if you look closely.

Juliana and I are making sure a plot corner is at the correct distance from two others. I'm using the super technical method of triangulation - basically marking 4 plot corners by splitting the square into triangles. And people say you won't ever use geometry...

Here's Scott and Juliana installing yet another PVC pipe. This picture doesn't actually show what exactly it is like to work in 100 degree weather, in the sun, near the hole in the ozone. It was freaking hot, but at least there was usually wind to help us out.

And, as this picture shows, here's our badass local technician, Juliana. She's very serious about standing next to the giant ant hill. As serious as she looks here, she's been awesome to work with. Besides working her butt off with us and doing a lot of heavy labor, she also gave us a tour of La Corona when we arrived, taught us that "Whiskerie" doesn't mean that a building is a distillary but in fact it is a brothel, and convinced us that armadillo was definitely worth trying for dinner some night.

So far, it's been an awesome field work experience.