Friday morning I left with some people from the Range Ecology club to Wyoming where a professor-turned-assessor was doing private land monitoring and restoration. Friday our group looked around and got some of the natural history of the area and began learning some of the prevalent species. Saturday and Sunday we participated in monitoring riparian areas by doing cross-sectional plant community and land type descriptions followed by green line descriptions in the same fashion. Roy, the land assessor, showed us his transect method which involved 100m tapes and triple nested quadrats. The paperwork he used caught the data in the same way as the Southern Plains Network, but felt much more vague in the presentation, which I suppose is different because of the how the land is being used. It wasn't so much a study as grasping the area and figuring out how to make it more useful to cattle without detriment to land.
Unfortunately, one of the bigger guys in the group turned out to be a snorer and his bellowing woke me up multiple times in the night. Since we started with breakfast at 6:30, I didn't get much sleep. Tonight I hope to finish my work quickly and try to catch up again. I think after this week things will slow down a bit, which will be nice.
Wednesday I have a meeting with someone involved with the Short Grass Steppe-Long Term Ecological Research center on campus. I had heard about a lab position which involved learning characteristics of Northeast Colorado plants and the categories they can be separated into; so it's a lab job that seems to come directly after field work. It's a work-study position and the university has given out all that money, but the lady there wants me to come in to chat and then show me the lab. I'm not sure if it's a job interview, so I'll have to wait and see. It's a small weekly hour requirement but I've felt swamped as is with my classes and clubs. Extra money would be nice, though.
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