Adventures in Big Sky Country: Crazy month of July

I realize it's been quite a while since I've updated the blog! I am sure you have all been waiting with baited breath waiting for my next entry ;-) The month of July was a bit crazy to say the least, and it really flew by! I can't believe that its already August.

I spent most of July collecting data for my graduate project. 3 weeks of 12-15 hour days sitting out in a hot, humid, buggy field. I seriously don't know if I've ever used that much bug spray in my life! Some cool things about my sites though: sandhill cranes, whitetail deer, moose, osprey, red-tailed hawks, pelicans, cow dogs, and the Kings Motel. Luckily, I also had a great field crew helping me. I definitely could not have done all of that work without their help! For anyone interested, the data I collected consists of cover and biomass. So for each of my treatments we randomly tossed 3 frames in to the plots, and estimated cover (of every species in the frame) and then clipped the plants (biomass) and sorted them out by functional group into paper bags (this means either Perennial grass, grass-like species, exotic forbs, native forbs, and tall buttercup). I also had 2 other sites where I ran three 100 meter transects running from low density of tall buttercup to high density of tall buttercup. We sampled every 5 meters along the transect, estimated cover, and collected biomass by species (this is even more difficult because you have to pick out every little piece of grass and put it in its respective bag). Every time I look at a piece of grass now I have a strange urge to clip it and identify it.. not sure if this is a good thing or not.

There were, of course, some adventures (it is grad school after all). Some of my favorites were the sweet giant spiders in the hayfields, attempting to use the outdoor facilities in mosquito infested willows, and my personal favorite; the giant wind gust that blew away all of my samples across the field. Some went into the irrigation canal, and Daniel, one of our field crew members, sacrificed his shoes and pants to save them for me. I can only imagine how hilarious I looked running across a field screaming "NOOOOOOOOO." As we all kept saying "it got pretty real in the tall buttercup field."

For any of you that would like to read a little more about what I'm doing check out this link: http://www.msuextension.org/invasiveplantsMangold/extensionsub.html
Click on July 2012 Tall buttercup.
Its a small article I put together about tall buttercup and my project

Its very tedious work, but luckily it is interesting to me! I don't think I would have ever found vegetation work appealing if I did not spend a whole summer working for the Restoration Ecology Lab at CSU the summer before my senior year.

Now I have literally hundreds (maybe even over a thousand) bags of biomass that will need to be weighed... and after that's done... on to the task of beginning to analyze all of that data. This is also a daunting task that I am choosing not to think about at this time.

School starts for me August 27th. I'll be taking 9 credits, I'm going to be a TA for freshmen level course, and I'll be working on my graduate project. Hopefully I won't be too busy that I won't have time for important things like eating and showering ;-)

Scott has been busy with work as well. He recently traded in his road bike for a mountain bike. This is pretty cool with me because I now have someone to ride my mountain bike with! We've been busy on the weekends, biking, hiking, floating rivers, and kayaking on some reservoirs just outside of Bozeman. We are also hoping to go on at least one backpacking trip before the summer is over, and we really want to make it to Glacier National Park before the snow starts to fall.

My parents, sister, and Grandma are coming out next week. They are staying in a condo right next to Yellowstone. I'm going to take a few days off next week to hang out with them, and Scott and I will spend next weekend up there. Hopefully I'll finally be able to see some wolves!

Sadly, all of my work pictures are on the work camera. I will post them on my next blog post though, because I'm sure you all want to see my amazing field sites and field crew. For now, here are a few others pictures from the past month.

We hope everyone is doing well!