Inventories
I am back in the field! I got back about a month ago, and am charging along on the last leg of my fieldwork before I write all this business up. One of the big foci on this trip are descriptive ecological inventories of the floodplain vegetation surrounding the village. I have done a lot of interviews about these different landscapes, so it is important that I am able to at least describe some of the plants out there.
Since the area I cover is too large to count every single plant out there, I have to sample a bunch of different areas (actually 60 locations in total, randomly selected, stratified by land use/land cover type from an orthophoto which I classified). Then I will use some statistical techniques to make generalizations about the floodplain flora. To do this, we lay out a 20m by 10m plot and then count the trees and shrubs which fall within this (there’s more to it, but that’s the punchline). We string together 5 of these at each site. The image above is of a couple of my research assistants laying out a line for a new plot.
Not only are we counting, but we are recording names (above). Most of the sites so far have been in rice fields or open savannas.
The open plots are fastest, as there are few trees or shrubs to actually record, (see above). However in addition to the big plots I mentioned above, we are also setting smaller plots within the main plots in order to collect data on the herbaceous understory– usually grasses and sedges. Above is an image of my research assistants setting out the sub-plot.
So we are cranking through these plots relatively quickly. I am happy with our progress so far, though I expect that we will slow down once we reach the sites farther out from the village. As one might predict, the areas closest to the village are mostly rice fields or savannas. Further off is where we’ll be getting into the thicker forest. That should be fun!
