Day 8

After a long discussion with Peter and Audrey last night, we finally compiled a data dictionary for vegetation. Our first issue was on what scale we were going to plot points. The ideal common product would have been at the taxa level, but since our level of research did not require that level of detail, focusing on the broader plant communities would suffice. Since our group did not have much experience in plants, we were very limited on the amount of fields to add into our data dictionary. Luckily Dr. Lee helped us out with some reading material as well as a book with local Hawaiian plants.  So with some help from Dr. Lee, Briton and Paul, we got our vegetation data dictionary up and running on a Trimble GPS unit. We started out with broad categories like coastal plants and dry forest and then made more detailed subcategories for things like trees or native plants. We also included some other options like canopy height (small, medium or large), stand (individual, mixed or pure) and stress level (low, neutral or high) with another text field option for additional comments. The additional comments text field proved to be very useful because we encountered unique areas that we wanted to identify and locate for other groups to use later on as well.

We went out to the field site today not with the tour bus but in our own cars. After adjusting some settings on the trimbles, the groups split up and went our own separate ways. The only problem was that 2 groups ended up having to share one unit (our vegetation group and the geology group) and ended up just planning to meet up later on and trade off since our areas of interests were so different from each other. Our vegetation group got it first and with Dr. Lee’s guidance we first headed to a point that had a good view of the study area. We mainly focused on trying to identify where the coastal plant communities stopped growing. Even though we had a book with plant pictures in them some of the plants were hard to distinguish/access and made our process really slow. We need a botanist to come help us ASAP to quickly help us identify key plants and characteristics of these plant communities so that we can start logging more meaningful data. Although we were limited in some ways we still had a very productive day out in the field to investigate and make sure that the areas that looked homogeneous to certain plant types were indeed pure and if they were not pure, to identify those plants. Along the way we found some areas that would be of interest to the hydrology team. It was a line of phreatophyte trees next to a swampy area closer to the shore line.

Finishing off the day by eating some Poke.