Last weekend I went on a one day field trip to see vegetation types of the inner coast ranges. We went to a riparian site, an oak woodland, and a chaparral site.
As usual, we trespassed onto the oak woodland site, this time bringing a handy dandy ladder to climb over the barbed wire instead of climbing through it like last time. The site was gorgeous and the day was really beautiful and mild in the morning.
Below is a picture of where we ate lunch! Beautiful.
Our last stop was the chaparral and is was truly hot and sticky by then. We had to do transects, which is basically a method of sampling the vegetation at a site where you take a measuring tape and you record exactly what species cross the tape at each point over a certain distance. You think of the tape as a two dimensional plane, and anything that crosses that plane needs to be recorded. As you can imagine from the picture below, it was a feat. Once you're off the path, you are basically bushwhacking and crawling under things in order to go in a straight line. It was not what I wanted to be doing at 4 pm on a Sat. in 85 degrees.
We saw some pretty wildflowers though.
Here is the pinecone of a Coulter pine. They call it the "widow maker" because you wouldn't want to be standing underneath it when it fell off the tree.
I have another field trip tomorrow, this one to the Folsom/Auburn area where things are said to be blooming right now. I will also try to get some pictures up from the Sacramento Cactus and Succulent Society show last weekend.
As usual, we trespassed onto the oak woodland site, this time bringing a handy dandy ladder to climb over the barbed wire instead of climbing through it like last time. The site was gorgeous and the day was really beautiful and mild in the morning.
Below is a picture of where we ate lunch! Beautiful.
Our last stop was the chaparral and is was truly hot and sticky by then. We had to do transects, which is basically a method of sampling the vegetation at a site where you take a measuring tape and you record exactly what species cross the tape at each point over a certain distance. You think of the tape as a two dimensional plane, and anything that crosses that plane needs to be recorded. As you can imagine from the picture below, it was a feat. Once you're off the path, you are basically bushwhacking and crawling under things in order to go in a straight line. It was not what I wanted to be doing at 4 pm on a Sat. in 85 degrees.
We saw some pretty wildflowers though.
Here is the pinecone of a Coulter pine. They call it the "widow maker" because you wouldn't want to be standing underneath it when it fell off the tree.
I have another field trip tomorrow, this one to the Folsom/Auburn area where things are said to be blooming right now. I will also try to get some pictures up from the Sacramento Cactus and Succulent Society show last weekend.
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