Day 3: Facing Invasives

Day 3 - Southern New Hampshire

Hello, lovely readers!

Today was another day out in the field. We took a bunch of transects around a preserve (17 in total, I do believe). We split into teams of three people to do this (after doing the first few together) and delegated the following tasks:

Many of our transects followed a randomized procedure, to ensure unbiased results. These transects are done in these areas about once a year to analyze trends in the invasive species concentrations, and how effective certain management strategies for these invasives have been.

For example, at our third site, the invasive levels were rather low, under 40% or 30%. However, the previous year, it was somewhere around 90% in the same area, completely infested with bittersweets. After the herbicide application, our results were very successful, which is awesome. But basically, here's how you would record a few points:

We spent almost the entire day collecting data on these transect points. We did some invasive species removal after collecting our data, as to not disturb it. After the day was over, we all felt significantly more comfortable with species identification (native and non-native!) We also made an effort before lunch to clean out an area covered with bittersweet and autumn olive, in hopes it will become a turtle nesting site.

We ate our lunch in our cleared area, all of us super hungry from our hard work. In the afternoon, at the end of the day, some of us went to pull some garlic mustard. Disappointingly, we couldn't get the roots out of the first-year plants, but found a good chunk/patch of second-year garlic mustard which we picked and threw out. The reason this is kind of upsetting is because it's a biennial plant. The first year has no seeds, so pulling it that year would be incredible, and not being able to do so was kind of sad.

But anyway, we did do a ton of invasives today. Our dinner got devoured almost as quickly as lunch (quesadillas, beans, corn and chicken!!) We're off to Manchester tomorrow, which should be super fun. More on that tomorrow.

Thanks for reading!

Over and out,
Your 2015 LEAF Crew