Today I tagged along with Arianna to some hydrologic monitoring.
Ariana has been a volunteer for the National Park Service since March and has been completing these surveys since that time. Arianna is currently taking classes and looking for a suitable program to pursue her degree in conservation biology.
The purpose of the hydrologic surveys is to determine the ground-water levels in the park. One objective is to determine if the area is conducive to establishing new wetland ecosystems.
Throughout FBF there are white PVC pipes tucked into the ground. Arianna has two tools she uses to monitor the water levels: one is electronic and the other is manual.
The manual monitor is a coil that Arianna lowers down into the pipe until it touches the water, at which point it beeps. Then she looks at how much coil was lowered and records how deep the water was.
Some of the stations are also electronic: at these stations she hooks up a laptop computer to the a recording device permanently attached to the pipe, and downloads the data.
Downloading this data takes a long time and I wondered why. It turns out that the water level is monitored continuously every 5 min. throughout the day.
If the water level is taken every 5 minutes, every day for a week, how many data points is that? Do that calculation and you will see why it took a long time to download the data!
While Ariana and I were locating the water monitoring pipes, we also got to see a really fun animal: the cottontail rabbit! These rabbits are very small with a fluffy white tail and brown/reddish fur. The problem with these cottontails is that they appear to not be afraid of trucks! However, they are afraid of humans. So the rabbits remained crouched on the path as the truck approached. I would have to kepp jumping out and shoo-ing the rabbits out of the way so they would not get run over. They were very cute!!
Another exciting find today was another box turtle! Arianna located him as he were driving in the truck. She must have excellent eyesight and powers of observation to be able to spot a small species like this hiding in the brush.
One cool thing was that this species had a tag. A tag on an animal means that a scientist has previously captured the animal and recorded several things about it: such as its size, weight, age, gender. Ariana recorded the number on the tag and location that we found this turtle. What is think we could use this information for?
Some things I noticed about this particular box turtle was that the mosquitoes were swarming around it. I was surprised that mosquitoes would bother reptiles such as a turtle. However this turtlel did not seem to be in the best health as it seemed to have a bit of green foam coming out of its nose and mouth. We contacted the ranger station and their advice was to let nature take its course.
We ended our day with the all-important tick check :)
Ariana has been a volunteer for the National Park Service since March and has been completing these surveys since that time. Arianna is currently taking classes and looking for a suitable program to pursue her degree in conservation biology.
The purpose of the hydrologic surveys is to determine the ground-water levels in the park. One objective is to determine if the area is conducive to establishing new wetland ecosystems.
Throughout FBF there are white PVC pipes tucked into the ground. Arianna has two tools she uses to monitor the water levels: one is electronic and the other is manual.
The manual monitor is a coil that Arianna lowers down into the pipe until it touches the water, at which point it beeps. Then she looks at how much coil was lowered and records how deep the water was.
Some of the stations are also electronic: at these stations she hooks up a laptop computer to the a recording device permanently attached to the pipe, and downloads the data.
Downloading this data takes a long time and I wondered why. It turns out that the water level is monitored continuously every 5 min. throughout the day.
If the water level is taken every 5 minutes, every day for a week, how many data points is that? Do that calculation and you will see why it took a long time to download the data!
While Ariana and I were locating the water monitoring pipes, we also got to see a really fun animal: the cottontail rabbit! These rabbits are very small with a fluffy white tail and brown/reddish fur. The problem with these cottontails is that they appear to not be afraid of trucks! However, they are afraid of humans. So the rabbits remained crouched on the path as the truck approached. I would have to kepp jumping out and shoo-ing the rabbits out of the way so they would not get run over. They were very cute!!
Another exciting find today was another box turtle! Arianna located him as he were driving in the truck. She must have excellent eyesight and powers of observation to be able to spot a small species like this hiding in the brush.
One cool thing was that this species had a tag. A tag on an animal means that a scientist has previously captured the animal and recorded several things about it: such as its size, weight, age, gender. Ariana recorded the number on the tag and location that we found this turtle. What is think we could use this information for?
Some things I noticed about this particular box turtle was that the mosquitoes were swarming around it. I was surprised that mosquitoes would bother reptiles such as a turtle. However this turtlel did not seem to be in the best health as it seemed to have a bit of green foam coming out of its nose and mouth. We contacted the ranger station and their advice was to let nature take its course.
We ended our day with the all-important tick check :)