We crossed the border without incident...almost

Today was another successful and somewhat stressful (at times) day working on our powerpoint presentation and preparing our interactive lesson plan. We are so excited about the finishing and can't wait to present tomorrow. We feel it was a successful and tiring endeavor. Tatiana is thrilled to be taking a computer class in Excel and powerpoint 2008. She has learned a lot from Ian and Dawn's graphing. We are happy to have worked on this project and feel satisfied if a bit tired:) with the results of our efforts.

Now it's your chance to hop the Border!

Borderjumpers

Almost done

We finished the table of contents and acknowledgements. We are printing them out as we speak and this means the completion of our notebook. Tomorrow we will spend all day on our preparation for presentation. oh goody!:D

Home Stretch

Almost there! Yesterday, we got a large portion of our notebook completed. The list of items that is complete without question includes; procedure/methods, work timeline, cover, Warren Farm map and a sample data collection sheet. We came very close to completing our data, but we still need to finish captions for each graph.

Today the list of items to be finished includes; a brief history of land-use, results, conclusions, tables of contents and personal narratives. It seems like a lot, but we have set a good work pace and it's possible we could have the notebook 95% completed by lunch! Then it will be time to begin work on the presentation and power point.

Initially, the thought of giving an hour long presentation was a little daunting, over the next two days we will have time to put together a decent presentation. The key will be to have a solid activity to keep the presentation from turning into a lecture.

The darkest cloud ever!

There was a lot of excitement today. After lunch we heard the claxton ringing loudly all over campus telling of a tornado warning and advising people to get into a building right away. The border jumpers are an adventurous lot, but did not want to test mother nature, so we went down to the basement classrooms. Thankfully, no tornado touched down on campus.

Around an hour later the tornado warning was called off - just in time for us to start working on our group notebook. We held a group pow wow in the hall and divided up the work. Jumper one decided to work on typing up the Process and Methodology section of our research project and jumpers two and three started the process of making all the charts look the same so they can be compared on Monday. It was a tedious process, but we completed most of our goals by the end of the afternoon. We are all looking forward to comparing the data and seeing what it tells us about the three sites.

This is a picture of the border jumpers after a long day on the computers!

Data Analysis: The Beginning of the end

Well our data collection is completed...excellent.  However, this means that we will not be going to Warren Farm anymore to hang out in the woods.  Such is life.  From now on, our days will be spent in the Morrill computer lab analyzing our data and working on the construction of our project notebook. Our data analysis so far has consisted of entering all our collected data into Excel spreadsheets and creating several exploratory graphs.  One of these graphs shows a clear comparison of Hemlock DBH between zones.  This works well for the Eastern Hemlock, but we do not feel this will be an effective method for data analysis for other species because the abundance is significantly lower.  Perhaps a graph which displays all the species would be more appropriate.  We will be exploring this possibility in the coming days. We were also confronted with the issue of translating our northing and easting points from our GPS unit onto a useable map.  After some initial conversation, we realized that it would be simpler to use latitude and longitude (days, minutes, seconds) instead of northing and easting.  Of course, this required converting our northing and easting to days, minutes and seconds.  That's more algebra and trig than we wanted to do!

This was not an easy task at all.  After much googling, clicking and reading, we managed to find a preprogrammed excel spreadsheet that allowed us to enter our northing and easting and convert it directly to days, minutes and seconds.  We then entered this data into Google Earth and verified that the information was indeed accurate.  Here is what we found:

It's difficult to see in this picture, but all nine of our plots are present.  We noticed that while we did our plots in straight lines, they are not represented as such in the picture.  This is most likely due to the accuracy of the GPS unit and possible decimal rounding in the conversion process.  In the coming days, we hope to begin our project notebook and finalize the representation of our data.  I'm visualizing many more days stuck in front of a computer.  No fun for people who really like to be outdoors, but necessary in order to share our data with others.  

We had to go back; We forgot Grandma.

We had to go back to the border. We measured shrubs and then changed our definition to include saplings. So two jumpers returned and one stayed this side of the border and worked on DBH classification graphs for Eastern Hemlock. In addition to measuring the saplings the two jumpers also gathered herbaceous plants for pressing. We've seen a lot of interesting things in our graphs which confirm our observations of the land.

Hopping the border

We mapped out our final plot today to determine the composition and abundance of trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants on our final Warren Farm land plot. We do not need to return to the land. We took photagraphs today and used GPS to mark our center for each of the three areas of analysis, the former farmland of the Warren property, the transitional borderland and the woodland. We are now charting and analyzing our data for presentation.

While from now on, we will be working primarily on data analysis, and have no real project needs to return to Warren Farm, a return trip is still not out of the realm of possibility.  We are debating about whether or not returning to collect some specimens for the purpose of plant pressing is something that would bolster our presentation and notebook.  Of course, it is not necessary for our data, so it was not a priority, but depending on the time we have left, it would be something extra to have that would allow others to more readily identify with the experiences we have had.

Additionally, we wrote yesterday of our flooded third plot, which is still flooded.  However, one of our Jumpers came prepared today with muck boots so no one would spend the rest of the afternoon in soggy shoes.  It turned out that the water only covered about 15% of our third plot on the Warren Farm land and was only a few inches deep.  In all likelihood, it would dry in a couple days, but with the forecast of rain tomorrow and the day after that, it probably will not dry for at least the next week.

Only one plot to go!

Bug-bitten and wet, the borderjumpers successfully completed 2 plots. We surveyed the woodland and were excited about the results. What a varied landscape we came upon. We found a large open area with an abundance of fern and noticed the presence of wildlife in the area. We saw a bright orange newt, toads, frogs, dragonflies and heard deer-or some other large animal we are uncertain of. Of course the wildlife have more keen senses and detected us surely long before we heard a sound. We are looking forward to entering and analyzing the data we collected. It's an exciting process. We'll keep you posted.

Jump #2

Today was extremely productive. We set a goal and managed to reach it! We ended last week with five completed plots (3 along the border and 2 on Warren Farm). We went out today with the goal of completing at least 3 plots and we managed to do it! Initially we returned to our third plot on the Warren Farm side of the border, but we ran into an issue in the form of water. As it turns out, the location where our third plot is set is rather low lying and today had a few centimeters of water in it. Severe thunderstorms over the weekend dropped a lot of rain and as water tends to do, it settled to low areas, i.e. the location of our third plot.

While some might have been concerned or caught up in deliberations, we were psyched about the opportunity to jump across the border into Barrington Headwaters. Upon initial inspection, the property on Barrington Headwaters will almost certainly have a higher abundance of trees. We also expected that the Hemlocks would be much smaller and while we may find that to be true, there were still some large Hemlocks in the area. We saw some interesting snags and old stumps with red shelf fungus living on them and many copiced trees. Some of the stumps were obviously left from the time the area had been logged and looked like they had been there for a long time. The place where we found the most mossy old stumps was an very tree free area with lots of fern and blueberry growing in it instead. I (Dawn) think it was a very magical spot!

While the Hemlock size and abundance is interesting, we found some very cool things on the Barrington side of the boundary that we did not find on the Warren Farm side. The number of stems is much higher in each plot area. While we know that each area was logged, we believe that the higher number of stems on the Barrington side is owed to the fact that Barrington was last logged long before the logging stopped on the Warren property. We can also attribute the apparent lack of shrubs to this as well. We also found a large Blueberry patch and a large dragonfly that was taking shelter in the rain on the bark of a Hemlock.

Before we end, just a quick note. When we went up the hill into the Barrington property, we did hear something large in the woods near us, but we were unable to verify what it was. We believe that it was most likely a deer, but it could have been a moose as Randy did see one on his farm a few days ago.

Border Jumping: Days 1-3

Today was our third day in the Barrington Wilderness. Our goal is to reach an understanding of how species composition and abundance (trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants) change between former farmland and Barrington Headwaters. Examination of the specific transitional zone along the border land is key to accomplishing our goal. Our border exists on the property line between Warren Farm and Barrington Headwaters. One of our crew was almost consumed by ticks, but we managed to save her.

Day 3 in the bush. Starving. the crew realizes we must ration the blueberries and Indian Cucumber root we've foraged despite the elements. Thus far, we have completed five plots and have found some very interesting things. On the property, there are numerous logging trails on the Warren Farm side of the border and the Barrington Headwaters clearly harbors a higher biodiversity, but again, this is an initial visual inspection. We will know for sure in the coming days when we finish collecting our data and begin analyzing.

The land itself is very cool. It takes us roughly twenty minutes to walk from the Christmas Tree Stand on Warren Farm to the property line. The walk itself is not strenuous, but it does take us far from any inhabited area. Even deep within the woods, we come across signs of human activity in the form of recent and past logging and where we are conducting our work, there are huge granite boulders that are the clear result of glacial activity in the past.

While our goals of this work are fairly straightforward (comparing plant species abundance and composition between different properties), we hope that our work will give us and future researchers, a clear view of how composition and abundance change over time and space. This study will lay the groundwork for further investigation; i.e. animal habitat study, substrate study, and land use implications.