Friday was day 2 in field in South Texas. We returned to a large pothole that Martin and I have been sampling since 2003. In 2004 we did some extensive soil sampling to evaluate the soil conditions in and around the pothole and used those data to determine the "edge" of the pothole. During Friday's efforts, we were attempting to determine if particular plant species delineate the same "edge". As could be expected, the plant distribution is more complex than the soil distribution, but we do have some key plants that indicate "in" or "out" of the pothole.
In addition to some plant sampling, we also used the GPS and laptop to identify potential potholes from the t-cap images and then used some four-wheel drive and some hiking to identify and additional four potholes that we had not identified or sampled in the past. By the end of the day we were batting 1000 on identifying potholes from the imagery and confirming them with field searches.
The photo included with this post shows Kim and Ann identifying plant species at sampling sites. Sampling sites were randomly selected using a psuedo-random sampler in the Hawth's tools extension in ArcGIS 9.2.
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