Back on the road...

After some downtime with the family and recovery from a nasty outer ear infection (could not resist a way-to-hot freshwater pool in Texas on our lab trip - see previous posts), I am back on the road this Monday thru Thursday for work on some of our international research projects. The flight in was an easy direct flight from LAX to Washington Dulles followed by a quick midnight cab ride to the hotel. Traveling for the SEER Lab is full of planes, trains, autos, 4x4s, and even boats and ATV's (sometimes). This shot is of the elevated bus ride from our terminal to the baggage claim area. I travel lite, so no baggage for me. The other photo is the computer setup... add it to the list of locations we setup shop (See previous blog).

down time...

Last week I took my family on a camping trip to King's Canyon National Park in the Sierras.  It was a much needed break and the park is absolutely beautiful.  My daughter is almost 1 (a few weeks to go) and she loved every bit of it. First sleep over in a tent for her, first cave, first large waterfalls, first huge mountains, first hike in a thunderstorm, first rattlesnake, first black bear... it was an awesome week.

Back at it with travel this week. Headed to DC for a few days for project meetings and some US-based research on the Azerbaijan projects that Ian blogs about (http://seerlab-azerbaijan.blogspot.com).  If I get into DC proper, I will post some photos.

Soil sampling

Saturday was our final day of field work on this (short) trip to south Texas. In addition to sampling vegetation and ground truthing the t-cap data, we needed to collect soil samples from some potholes in the northern extent of our current study site. In the past we have used two soil sample site selection methods, regular grid sampling and regular-interval line transects, to delineate "edges" of potholes. For this trip we used a line transect to collect 20 soil samples from a northern pothole in Jim Hogg County. In this photo Ann is collecting a soil sample that will be processed for several key minerals back at the soils lab at Louisiana State University (we sent them home with Martin).

Setting up shop

One of the exciting parts of field work is "setting up shop", or finding empty space in the brush, in the truck, or in the bunk house/tack room to scratch out a corner setup a computer to prep or backup field data.

This week we used the Jeep Liberty, the horse tackle room, and the brush to setup shop and move data between the PDAs and the laptops.

While not ergonomic, an uncomfortable round of data prep in the field beats a day in the AC and white lights of the lab!

Ground truthing t-cap images

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.