Rainy California...

So if you look at the milestones list, we were planning on starting our seedling transects in mid-March. But... we've been getting so much rain (which is wonderful from an ending-the-drought perspective) that is has slowed down our timeline. The nearest field site is a muddy swamp (the trail in is not a maintained trail, and is used by horses), the Sonoma field site was off-limits for a while (and still will be, potentially, off and on depending on storm systems) because burned sites are at risk of mudslide and tree limb fall after rain, and the Big Sur site has iffy access during storm season (mudslides, rockslides).

So, I'm going to be publishing a series of lab notes to tell you what we've been up to. One will look at an experiment we're setting up, one will discuss our new computer system we're building (neither of these was part of the experiment.com funded part of the project, but they're part of the overall project), AND I'll share the preliminary results of our first seedling transects, which we completed last weekend in Sonoma County.

In the meantime, the new sets of radshields are mostly finished (as I previously posted), the first new sets of dataloggers have been ordered (we're waiting on deployment till it looks like the rainy season has stopped - or at the end of April for the first ones, even if it's still raining), and we're working on the posters for the student research poster portion of our Earth Stewardship Symposium in a few weeks. And we're doing some microclimate temperature measurements for redwood seedlings here on campus, just to keep our hand in. Oh - and I'm meeting with a programmer team/group (a mix of faculty and students) to look into a collaborative effort that would allow us to go deeper with the seedling climate envelope model. And I gave a talk to our local chapter of the California Native Plant Society about the project and what we're trying to do, so that was fun - an hour of intense redwood discussion, with lots of questions. In addition to the usual CNPS people, a few former students and a few current students also showed up, and I met a fascinating young woman who is working on her masters degree at San Jose State, looking at different moss species and their physiological requirements.

 

The young redwood in the foreground is one of the ones we are monitoring on campus. Some of our biology labs are in the background, but my lab/classroom is to the left just out of the picture.