In September, Marina will join our lab. She will study spatial patterns and metacommunity dynamics in Carolinian forest understory plants, and Andrew MacDougall is her co-advisor (since obviously I know nothing about plants). Today we visited 2 forest fragments, just to get an idea on the spatial (and temporal) scales of heterogeneity, and to get an idea of the practical considerations that drive the development of a research program.
The first set of pictures are some overviews of the different landscapes.
Here are some pictures of the field ecologists in action (guess I am missing on all these pictures ;-)
And here are some close-ups of the various understory plants.
We finished our trip with a visit to Andrew’s new field site. He planted 45 ha (?) with native plants for a large-scale field experiment. Sadly enough, we have a very dry spring, and almost no germination. They predict rain for the weekend, but will it be enough? Sadly, this was a disappointing end of an informative and fun field trip.
Now we just have to wait what questions Marina will choose to explore for her PhD. (And you can see all the pictures in high resolution in the lab picasa site.)
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| 2010-04 Field visit Carolinian forests |
