Downed trees

The winds on Saturday felled a few trees across and near the road. Normally, I would just cut those trees out, but these trees require more than I am able to do, either because it is in danger of falling further (after some other big wind event) over the road:


about to fall further over the road:


or too big for me to get by myself:


All three are near the bottom of the drive, so I hope that the university's groundskeeping staff will be able to cut them out (and leave the wood behind to break down slowly in the forest).

Burned the garlic mustard

Today, I spent about 1 hour collecting more garlic mustard from around the property. ... and then (because it was during an interlude between the rains) burned over one wheelbarrow-full of the stuff. The smoke and steam that came off of it was amazing, and I worked hard to burn the rest of the stuff. Luckily, there was enough wood collected from the fall and winter to feed the multiple fist-fulls of garlic mustard.

And then... after about one hour of burning, I scattered the wood, and allowed the ashes the burn down (an oncoming storm front also helped keep the embers down).

Working on mapping the forest (update 1)

The mapping process plods on -- slowly. At the property management meeting at the start of the week, I was introduced to the mapping project of the SNRE properties that is going on presently with Dr. Bergen, and I really would like to get my hands on some of that spatial data to ensure that I'm not doing the same work.

Weeding

Did a bunch of weeding of garlic mustard this morning, and added to them the growing pile for burning. ... perhaps tonight.

Speaking of garlic mustard, most of them are flowering right now: little balls of white flowers that (remarkably) continue to grow toward the light, even if they are uprooted and thrown to the side.

Management meeting

A sunny day... A little brisk out, but the sun should help keep me warm. This morning, I spent time working with the property committee discussing various things vis-a-vis data management in the forest. I learned that K. B. has many, many data layers of land cover of Saginaw Forest going back to the 1940s (and digitized land-cover layers). Then, in my own wanderings around the forest, I encountered many things indicating different studies going on in the Forest (and possibly from bygone days). The need for some standardized idea of the type, extent, and experimenters out in the forest - as well as the length of various studies - would make for a good addition to the types of data that the caretaker could be in charge of.

Picking garlic mustard... got something else

These past few days, I've been nursing a small case of poison ivy that I apparently picked up while uprooting some garlic mustard. Yay... Another sign of spring. Somehow, though, it doesn't make me very happy...

Lost data

This morning, I went out and collected GPS data points from throughout the forest, and I downloaded them onto my computer and transferred them to the correct data format for use in ArcGIS. However, I saved them as "tracks" instead of "points", and so when I cleared the data from the GPS unit (thinking that I had actually saved all the data), they were gone.

A whole morning of trekking through the forest and collecting spatial data and making notes of each of the points: gone. Oh well, at least I now know where most of the special trees are. And at least, the line for the paths was saved, so I am getting an ever-better representation of the trail-network in the forest. (Silver lining.)

I need to finish the work on the GIS work this weekend, which means forest treks later this afternoon.