Finished!

The Comanche Lookout Park Listening Post project is finished! Yesterday I mailed out the CD of the recordings to the city forester at San Antonio Parks & Recreation. I haven’t been notified that the physical posts are installed, but I was assured that they would be as soon as I marked where they should go, and I did that last week.

Now all I need is to do some publicity so that people know the trail is there and how it may be used. I think the students got something out of the experience… at least I hope so! Maybe we’ll even be able to extend the trail next year and add more posts. It really all depends on the enthusiasm of the students. I’m happy to do anything that gets the kids outside and interacting with their natural environment. It seems there’s so little of that these days!

I’m leaving on Friday to return to Miami to visit family there. I may stop and take pictures on the way again, and I’ll post them here. The picture above is a Spanish Dagger yucca that is featured on one of our Listening Posts. Ta!

Community Project Update

Sorry it's been so long between posts! Life has a habit of getting in the way of my blogging. I have been working on my community project, though. My AP Environmental Science class and I met with our urban forester Michael Nentwich at Comanche Lookout Park near Madison at the end of February. We identified numerous trees and woody shrubs, while Mr. Nentwich gave us some interesting background information and we took copious notes. After Spring Break, my APES class and I returned to the park to decide where best to place the listening stations. My next task is to speak to our wood shop teacher again and get information on where to buy the wood for them to make the listening station posts. Then my APES students will be tasked to write scripts. I hope to finish before the end of school but we have so much to accomplish: TAKS testing, AP testing, general end-of-year craziness. I'll post a few photos from our last Comanche park visit. Enjoy!

Let's Keep the Conversation Going

I think we've seen and discussed interesting things in this blog. As part of my contract with Earthwatch, I've promised to do some project to involve the community in conservation. So I plan on posting my progress here and I hope my students, or their parents, or others in the Madison HS community, or heck, purt near ANYBODY, will comment and discuss the project here.

My project idea is based on a newspaper article I read in October, before I was awarded the Earthwatch fellowship. The article detailed a yearly nature walk by visually impaired persons at Comanche Lookout Park here in San Antonio. Here's my idea: to involve the Lions' Club, San Antonio Parks and my APES (or other Madison students) to identify the plants along the trail, post markers and provide a Podcast that can be downloaded to assist people in learning about native and non-native plants in our area. Tell me what you think here.

Promises to Keep

Our group was split up today. Four of us went back into the forest to work on surveying the trees in column 7. One of us stayed inside to check the data that was entered yesterday. Two more went to weigh the leaf litter that had been collected, sorted and dried last week.
It amazes me, the use to which the forest has been put. Loggers and owners collect and sell the trees for wood, which of course the nation requires for many uses: home building, furniture, paper. Hunters use the woods for recreation (once it was actual food-gathering, but we no longer depend on it). The forest is used by scientists to understand our world better, and by teachers who want to educate our populace on the importance of forests. To say nothing of the food and shelter it provides for the non-human species. What mysteries are still hidden in the mossy trunks and fallen leaves of the forest? What connections are there that we have not discovered? What medicines might be found, or foods, or other new uses? I feel privileged to have been a part, however small, of this great effort to study this mesmerizing ecosystem.
Here’s a challenge: how many forest products do you use daily?
This afternoon we listened to a short lecture by Jess Parker, the Principal Investigator for this project. He explained to us the importance of this project in terms of understanding forest structure and how it may change due to climate change. Then, this evening we spent some time together eating dinner and shopping in Annapolis. All in all, I met a great group of people and had a terrific experience. Tomorrow is a travel day; we’re all leaving to return to our homes. See you on Monday!

Whose Woods These Are

Today was a little warmer and more overcast; rain is expected tonight and tomorrow will be a little colder. It feels cold until I get moving climbing over downed logs in the logged study plots to get to the rain gauges. Then I feel quite warm. It’s very sad to see the logged area… there are weak, scraggly trees still standing, some of them dying. There are large logs just left to rot. I wonder why they cut them if they weren’t going to haul them off. It reminds me of stories of the buffalo hunters, how they would slaughter and skin a herd, then leave the rest of the animal to rot.
I feel what I’m doing here is so important, and yet what I do every day is even more so: educating the youth of our country in science, especially environmental science. We know and understand so little of the relationships among organisms, and we are destroying whole ecosystems at an alarming rate. In the end, I fear we will destroy ourselves, not by war or nuclear attack, but by cutting the strands of life that bind organisms together until our world falls apart. We need to protect the living things around us, because we and they form an “uber-organism”, like the different cell types in a single human body. By protecting our environment, we protect our species as well.

The Air Up There

A beautiful, sunny, cold morning…frost in the grass flashes like sequins. We continued our tree survey and finished our column of subplots in late morning. Our survey team split up, two of us (Romney and me) volunteering to enter the data in an Excel spreadsheet, while two others (Janice and Stacey) go off with Nancy to collect data from rain gauges, since it rained here Sunday. The rain gauge is very interesting: it has a metric side and an English side, and the graduations are not constant, but increase in value as you read from bottom to top of the gauge.
After lunch, we climbed a tower that holds instruments to make solar measurements. This tower rises 120 feet above the forest floor; 10 flights of steps. It sways somewhat in the wind. From the top you can see the Rhode River (really an estuary) and beyond it, the Chesapeake Bay. I’m attaching the video I took from on top.
Following this adventure, we all helped to gather rain gauge data from the remaining gauges. I’m also including some photos of this activity. Brad from Hawaii and I paired up to help this data collection. I guess we missed the fun, though… In the other group who worked the plot across the road, Loren from California climbed into a hollow tree. “That’s weird,” he said. The other teachers were laughing uproariously. Loren hadn’t realized that a squirrel had jumped onto his back from inside the tree and scampered out down his rear end! It may end up on YouTube yet.
This evening, one of the scientists will be presenting a lecture on climate change, so I’m signing off for now. Watch out for those sneaky squirrels!

Finally... Forest!

At last I have arrived in Maryland. It was quite early this morning, 1 am to be precise. I fell into bed trying not to disturb my roommate, Janice from New Orleans. I slept exhausted but comfortably until 7 am this morning. I’m pumped, though, and the adrenaline has kept me going all day.
I met my teammates at breakfast (we make our own, but the pantry is well stocked). They are all incredibly intelligent, articulate and sensitive people from all over: Hawaii, California, Oklahoma, New York, Louisiana, and New Jersey. We all teach, but the grade levels and subjects vary widely, from 3rd grade through middle school to high school. The little video I’ve included here is a short introduction of the team I worked with today.
We assembled at 8:45 to receive our instructions and equipment from the technicians Jess and Nancy, who are wonderfully knowledgeable about the temperate deciduous forest. Here follow some technical details, science buffs…
The area, a former farm, is sectioned into plots called hectares (10, 000 m2). Each hectare is divided into subplots of 100 m2 (10m x 10 m). Remember our quadrats, APES? Same thing, just larger. Each hectare’s subplots are assigned a row and column number, basically X-Y coordinates. We were split into 2 teams of 4 and given a column of subplots to work on. My team of four, Janice, Stacy, Kate and I, were assigned column 6, and we began with row 1, so the first subplot is called 6-1. In each subplot, we measured “diameter at breast height”, or DBH for every tree over 1 cm in diameter (no calculating here, APES: they have special tape measures that convert the circumference to diameter). We gave each tree a unique number, and recorded its position in the subplot using X and Y coordinates. In addition, we classified the tree crown as dominant(the highest), codominant(maybe not quite so high), intermediate (reaching for the sky but not there yet)or suppressed (understory). We made additional notes about whether the tree was living, dying or dead (but still rooted), about damage and pretty much anything else we observed.
So, here’s today’s challenge: what is a tree’s connection to climate change? In other words, how do trees make a difference (or do they?) in global warming. Hint: what do trees withdraw from the atmosphere that may be causing problems?

The photo at the top, BTW, is a fungus growing on a stump. What trophic level do you think the fungus belongs on?