To Sampling

I gave my last presentation for the summer on Wednesday. Thursday, with the ultra-long day lengths and Ozarks flora busting out all over the place, I started my vegetation sampling. I've been preparing for it by spending hours in the fine herbarium (though ruing that there are few collections of Sporobolus and Juncus...), listening to my Peterson warbler cds on the little computer on the desk there and cross checking the herbarium specimens with Steyermark and George.

Glades are in full glory now, and some of the spring guys are still noticeable enough to count--I found a few desiccated stalks of Draba cuneifolia on Friday, and the violets are still visible despite the dry weather. I have a lot of plots to revisit this year and my colleague has a lot of field verification to conduct to make sure my data is accurate. I added a new species to our glade restoration plots this week, Parthenium hispidum, a very distinctive Parthenium that grows in huge clumps on this recent restoration unit. I collected data pre-treatment, post cedar removal, and this year I'll revisit the transects during the first growing season after the first fire that occurred in early November. Glade restoration -when accomplished correctly- is fun to follow because most glades will respond positively to cedar removal and fire. But bulldozing cedars on glades like they're doing in Arkansas? Bringing wood chippers on glades? I bet the plot data in those situations would reveal a lot of soil disturbance, and certainly not the rich matrix of glade flora that I will encounter in the coming weeks.