Greg here to keep you up to date on where we've been and what we've been up to this week. This post will be about our Tuesday research hike on Mt Starr King in Jefferson, NH, and I'll be writing a few more posts about other trips into the field over the next day or two.
On Tuesday July 31st, Kim from the Rey Center and I met up with Plymouth State University Professor Michele Pruyn, undergrad researcher Leighton, and high school volunteer Haley to hike Mt Starr King and collect information about almost 30 trees spread out along the trail to its summit. Grad students and volunteers have been observing the development of these trees every spring and fall for several years, but we were there this week to get measurements of what they're like at their peak.
Each tree was flagged so they were mostly easy to find, except for one spruce that shall remain nameless, and we developed a good rhythm after the first couple of trees. Haley and I would measure how big each trunk was, use a inclinometer to measure its height, and estimate its canopy density while Professor Pruyn and Leighton measured the canopy area and gave the tree a health assessment. To the untrained eye it might have looked like a bunch of people yelling random numbers at Kim with the clipboard, but trust me, there was a system. We had to call off our hike four trees short of the summit, possibly because it was getting late, and possibly because we got a bit distracted by the other interesting plants along the way, including these flowering Indian Pipes, a very strange non-photosynthetic plant:
Even though we came up just short of the summit, we all finished the day tired but proud that we had contributed our part to what will hopefully turn into a very long term monitoring program.
And lastly, because people have been bugging me about this, the picture of the Rey Center in our banana costumes in the 4th of July parade:
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