This week we began wrapping up the various projects that we have been working on over the course of the semester. Our first project of the semester was conducting urban tree inventories in Bristol, Middlebury, and Vergennes. Quick recap of the tree inventory project: we documented the size, species and condition of trees in the public right-of-way and compiled management and inventory reports for the towns to use for future planning. This project was done in collaboration with the Vermont Urban and Community Forestry Program. This week we concluded these projects with a presentation to the respective boards of the communities.
Bristol crew sending it in their presentation!
Middlebury coming through with the help of Eric on the Q & A at the end.
Vergennes....calm, cool, and collected.
We finished the evening by buying amazing sandwiches and discussing our week (it's Small Team Project time so we have been oh-so-lonely since we haven't been meeting as a group). We also had one last hurrah packing into the LANDS vans before saying goodbye to those lovely beasts for good.
The day following our urban tree presentation was the last day the small teams were allotted time to work on mapping, management plan writing and editing, and finalizing the deliverables for each project sponsor. There were only a few tears to be shed as last minute issues with our backup drive arose.
This carried us into the next couple of days which consisted of lots of office scenery, complete with soft computer screen rays, labyrinth of Ethernet cables, and sporadic events of madness, as we were reviewing and fixing all of the reports we have created so far, while simultaneously attempting to finalize our STPs.
We also helped with a climate change experiment happening in the back yard of the Forest Service Building. In preparation for winter, we surrounded the study plots with plastic to help protect the trees from the harsh weather that is to come.
And under the instruction of Carl Waite, we successfully made a dent in the installation process. Although no snow, we do have the cold.
There has been a lot on our to-do list, but we have been able to divide and conquer in order to complete the various tasks at hand.
Check in next week to get caught up on the last full week of the first LANDS semester program!
Until then, Cheers! Brian and Zoe
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