Wow – it’s already fall, the leaves are starting to change color, and I swear that just the other day the summer season of field work was starting up! More than anything I’d like to think that’s a testament to how busy the summer was for our lab.
We had five awesome undergraduate students working during the summer, most of whom came with a semester’s worth of experience already. So we hit the ground running in late May as soon as commencement was over and worked to finish collecting soil samples that we’ll use to study interactions between environmental factors and habitat formation at Knox Preserve. All told we collected about 850 samples over the course of the spring and early summer – a pretty mean feat considering that half the site is densely forested. The Weed Lab team then spent much of the summer analyzing moisture, salinity and carbon levels in the collected soils. Finally, twice during the summer we re-visited vegetation sampling plots we established last fall to monitor plant community responses to the removal of invasive plants. These visits took some time as we were measuring half a dozen different parameters – including plant species diversity, abundance, canopy cover and changes in the morphology of specific native and invasive plants.
It was a lot of work but we have a ton of data to start sifting through now, and excitingly the data we’ve already analyzed has helped Avalonia better plan out their management for the coming year. This is really the ultimate goal of the project anyway, helping to make invasive plant control more effective while minimizing non-target ecological impacts. With the summer field season in our rear view mirror now we’re all gearing up for a productive academic year of research, and fondly remembering the days when all we had to do was research.
Drawing by Cassandra Cronin