Today we would be measuring carbon and salt-marsh species in Whangapoua (Wh in Maori is Ph). We headed to a white sand beach: pristine and beautiful. From the beach one group laid out a 500m transect (tape measure) through the salt-marshes and into the mangroves. We took it in turns to leapfrog down the transect, laying out a plot, and recording the two dominant species along with an estimation of their cover.
The work was fairly tedious because there were only a few species present, and getting a look at ground level involved much squishing. The carbon measuring (which groups did in turns) at every plot was much more interesting! Luitgard (lecturer) stuck a device over the soil which records the influx of carbon, R stuck a thermometer in the ground, I took the GPS, and S made notes.
The mangrove forest was really fun: squelchy and muddy and smelly, a great end to the data-collection / work part of the trip. It was time to head back to the beach. We had waves to catch! We all "tog"ged up and ran into the sea and spent about an hour swimming and playing in the waves - it was lovely. After dinner (potato curry) we got dressed up and went to the pub. There we played pool, darts, spoke random languages, and had a really great evening. In the bus on the way home we serenaded Sandra and George with "Teenage Dirtbag" and unloaded to head to the jetty to see the bioluminescence of the water.
Due to Y and I being particularly keen, we got onto the jetty just as the boat owner was heading home. Not knowing he wasn't one of our group, I accosted him about not climbing in other people's property. He turned around and I apologised profusely, and he offered to take myself and Y on a boat ride to see the bioluminescence more clearly. The wake of the boat glowed silver, and the sides and into the lake were all silver: it was really stunning. Back on the jetty, a group of us hung out and star-gazed, finding the southern cross amongst other things.
The next day we started the drive back to the ferry terminal, but stopped off en-route to go to the hot springs. On the path to the water, we saw a Morepork - New Zealand's last surviving owl - and it was so sleepy and looking at us, blinking, clearly not happy to have been disturbed! At the spring we were warned not to put our heads under-water as we could contract amoebal meningitis and die. With that message ringing in our ears, we plunged into the pools and carefully had a relaxing time.
Back on the road we stopped off for ice-cream and petrol and then back to the ferry. I had a good old nap for the first couple of hours, but was awoken by a very powerful smell of chips. Heading downstairs I enquired as to whether or not they had any, to be told I must be hallucinating! Later on people started getting beer, so I headed downstairs to get one for myself, to have the following conversation with the barman:
- Are you from Newcastle?
- erm... no...
(random guy: isn't that quite insulting?)
- where are you from?
- london
- south london?
- the insults just keep coming!
We spent the last hour on the front deck chatting and watching Auckland grow bigger as the sun set. We docked, said our goodbyes, and G came to meet me at the ferry terminal.
All in all: a bloody good trip!
Monday, 7 April 2014
Great Barrier Island Part 3 (as told by C)
Wednesday morning was the usual breakfast, make lunch, pile in van. This time, however, we drove to meet an esteemed ecologist: Mr Ogden. His thick Yorkshire accent made it hard for me to follow what he said, I was too busy enjoying his voice. He led us through the peaty bog and told an anecdote whilst we waited for Janet and George to find the place for us to core. We would be looking at the charcoal contents of the core to gain a history of the island.
The area we were in was originally marine, but excessive burning of the vegetation meant the topsoil had slid down and ended up filling in the area. This in turn meant that salt-marshes and wetland forests started to form. The plant species we would be recording tomorrow were introduced - three types of rushes. There was also plenty of sea-spinach which is delicious and would have made excellent sandwiches.
At the coring site we were introduced to the equipment as Janet introduced us to the coring process. After she had extracted the core, she asked if there were any willing volunteers to get their hands dirty. Of course, I was the only one who stepped forward. I held the corer and posed for the photo that George took (core-nography) as she rotated and scraped it into a piece of pipe cut to size. Other people then had their chance to push the corer into the ground and extract the boggy earth.
After coring a couple more times, we headed back to the accommodation to begin extracting information from the cores. We split into two groups and were given one core each. We then sub-divided into four groups and cut the core four-ways. Every 2cm we scraped a tea-spoon's worth of peat into a beaker. After this we added bleach to the beakers and shaked them around and left them to bleach.
During the bleach we headed upstairs for a lecture on statistics (not before managing to squeeze in another game of bananagrams!). After the lecture, the samples were ready and we began to filter the bleached solutions. This involved plenty of water, so the other S in our team took to running back and forth refilling everyone's bottles. Y and I were on one bucket, and S and R on the other. Two other people went upstairs to start counting the charcoal. We finished filtering just in time for dinner (chickpea curry and rice) and another game of bananagrams!
That evening we spent counting charcoal by pouring the solutions into channels, placing them under a microscope, and clicking a counter every time we saw some. The first solution I examined had so much charcoal in it I almost broke my thumb. This high level of charcoal means that humans had definitely arrived by this point in time. Throughout the world, the arrival of humans at any particular place is always coincidental with high levels of charcoal in samples. Wherever we go, we slash and burn.
As the charcoal was being counted, we started to make graphs of our results. At first we tried to use the computer to draw the graphs, but it was configured to the person's tastes and no-one else could use it. Also, Excel is not intuitive in producing histograms. S and R therefore hand-drew this beautiful graph replete with illustrations of rats and waka (the canoes the Maori used to get to NZ). My histogram was upside-down, back-to-front, and very badly shaded in. However, it got the message across and was almost exactly the same as the published data so that was quite exciting.
The other group presented their findings to us, and we to them, and all-in-all Janet was very pleased with the session: it was the first time this had been done and so no-one was sure it would work. Bed on a high!
The area we were in was originally marine, but excessive burning of the vegetation meant the topsoil had slid down and ended up filling in the area. This in turn meant that salt-marshes and wetland forests started to form. The plant species we would be recording tomorrow were introduced - three types of rushes. There was also plenty of sea-spinach which is delicious and would have made excellent sandwiches.
At the coring site we were introduced to the equipment as Janet introduced us to the coring process. After she had extracted the core, she asked if there were any willing volunteers to get their hands dirty. Of course, I was the only one who stepped forward. I held the corer and posed for the photo that George took (core-nography) as she rotated and scraped it into a piece of pipe cut to size. Other people then had their chance to push the corer into the ground and extract the boggy earth.
After coring a couple more times, we headed back to the accommodation to begin extracting information from the cores. We split into two groups and were given one core each. We then sub-divided into four groups and cut the core four-ways. Every 2cm we scraped a tea-spoon's worth of peat into a beaker. After this we added bleach to the beakers and shaked them around and left them to bleach.
During the bleach we headed upstairs for a lecture on statistics (not before managing to squeeze in another game of bananagrams!). After the lecture, the samples were ready and we began to filter the bleached solutions. This involved plenty of water, so the other S in our team took to running back and forth refilling everyone's bottles. Y and I were on one bucket, and S and R on the other. Two other people went upstairs to start counting the charcoal. We finished filtering just in time for dinner (chickpea curry and rice) and another game of bananagrams!
That evening we spent counting charcoal by pouring the solutions into channels, placing them under a microscope, and clicking a counter every time we saw some. The first solution I examined had so much charcoal in it I almost broke my thumb. This high level of charcoal means that humans had definitely arrived by this point in time. Throughout the world, the arrival of humans at any particular place is always coincidental with high levels of charcoal in samples. Wherever we go, we slash and burn.
As the charcoal was being counted, we started to make graphs of our results. At first we tried to use the computer to draw the graphs, but it was configured to the person's tastes and no-one else could use it. Also, Excel is not intuitive in producing histograms. S and R therefore hand-drew this beautiful graph replete with illustrations of rats and waka (the canoes the Maori used to get to NZ). My histogram was upside-down, back-to-front, and very badly shaded in. However, it got the message across and was almost exactly the same as the published data so that was quite exciting.
The other group presented their findings to us, and we to them, and all-in-all Janet was very pleased with the session: it was the first time this had been done and so no-one was sure it would work. Bed on a high!
Great Barrier Island Part 2 (as told by C)
Tuesday morning was greeted with a lovely breakfast, during which I managed to shock several people in the dining room by having marmite and peanut butter on toast. Apparently marmite is an acceptable level of weird, but peanut butter takes the biscuit. We met on the lawn after breakfast and had a quick induction as to the plan for the day and bundled in the van kitted up and ready to go. S was eager to show me hebe (a type of flower) and we were looking out the left side of the van when suddenly we met the cliff. Someone else had been driving on our side of the road so George was forced to swerve. The worst part of it? The offender didn't even wave.
S, R, B, T, George and I said our goodbyes to the other groups and headed into the bush along the Perimeter fence. The fence was specifically set up to prevent rats from entering the sanctuary, but unfortunately rats have managed to re-enter (probably by swimming across the sea from ratted islands). For those of you who don't know, rats are a biodiversity nightmare in New Zealand and (next to humans) are almost single-handedly responsible for the major decline and slow recovery of (now) extremely rare birds. George has also proposed a theory that they are responsible for spreading fires which have a bad effect on plant life.
Great Barrier Island's vegetation is split roughly into four zones. After a fire, very scrubby fire-loving plants such as manuka (tea-tree) start to grow. Then a succession starts with kanuka (also tea-tree). Then fast-growing woody plants such as kauri start to take over, which then succumbs to shade-tolerant plants such as tawa and kohekohe. This is visible across the landscape where in the gullies lie the forest and on the ridges (the less fertile land) the manuka and kanuka. We were taking measurements to understand this landscape. We were also collecting data to see how effective the predator-proof fence actually was.
Over the course of the day, we took every other data point (so roughly every 100m) with B and T and collected data from about ten places. The first part of the day was spent climbing up the steep hill using the fence to hoist ourselves up. At one point we fought our way through cutting grass only to find on the other side the forest floor was so steep we wouldn't be able to collect anything! The second half of the day was easier, although we encountered some mean manuka and ended up covered in scratches. Due to the path we took, we ended up walking back to the campsite, took a swim off the jetty, had some tea, and hung about waiting for the others to return.
This gave me time to review the vast number of plants in my repertoire (at least fifteen) with the patient S. After dinner (plate of salad with a mound of tofu and berry smoothie for dessert), we played bananagrams before having the next lecture. We were also introduced to the work to be performed tomorrow: coring a peaty bog to count the charcoal to determine the arrival date of humans.
S, R, B, T, George and I said our goodbyes to the other groups and headed into the bush along the Perimeter fence. The fence was specifically set up to prevent rats from entering the sanctuary, but unfortunately rats have managed to re-enter (probably by swimming across the sea from ratted islands). For those of you who don't know, rats are a biodiversity nightmare in New Zealand and (next to humans) are almost single-handedly responsible for the major decline and slow recovery of (now) extremely rare birds. George has also proposed a theory that they are responsible for spreading fires which have a bad effect on plant life.
Great Barrier Island's vegetation is split roughly into four zones. After a fire, very scrubby fire-loving plants such as manuka (tea-tree) start to grow. Then a succession starts with kanuka (also tea-tree). Then fast-growing woody plants such as kauri start to take over, which then succumbs to shade-tolerant plants such as tawa and kohekohe. This is visible across the landscape where in the gullies lie the forest and on the ridges (the less fertile land) the manuka and kanuka. We were taking measurements to understand this landscape. We were also collecting data to see how effective the predator-proof fence actually was.
Over the course of the day, we took every other data point (so roughly every 100m) with B and T and collected data from about ten places. The first part of the day was spent climbing up the steep hill using the fence to hoist ourselves up. At one point we fought our way through cutting grass only to find on the other side the forest floor was so steep we wouldn't be able to collect anything! The second half of the day was easier, although we encountered some mean manuka and ended up covered in scratches. Due to the path we took, we ended up walking back to the campsite, took a swim off the jetty, had some tea, and hung about waiting for the others to return.
This gave me time to review the vast number of plants in my repertoire (at least fifteen) with the patient S. After dinner (plate of salad with a mound of tofu and berry smoothie for dessert), we played bananagrams before having the next lecture. We were also introduced to the work to be performed tomorrow: coring a peaty bog to count the charcoal to determine the arrival date of humans.
Saturday, 5 April 2014
Great Barrier Island Part 1 (as told by C)
It's been a week now since I came back from Great Barrier Island, and I've had much uni work and computer-y things to be doing. In addition, I didn't want to post about such a beautiful island without accompanying photos. Alas, I have none, but if my "official photographer" comes through, then post I shall.
G was kindly enough to walk me to the ferry terminal at half six in the morning, helping me to carry one of the bags. The class boarded the ferry, and I secured myself a comfortable seat on the deck and fell asleep for a good few hours. Almost suitably refreshed, the heavens decided to open and we were forced to the shelter just behind the engine room. That did not go so well. My soon-to-be-roommate, S, spent the next hour and a half puking. I sat out front groaning and moaning for a bit until I spotted GBI and instantly became excited for the week ahead.
We piled off the ferry and into the vans where we slowly made our way to the accommodation, stopping half a dozen times for George, the lecturer, to point out various things about the landscape through which we were driving. When he talked about plant species, I was at a complete loss as to what on earth he was saying. Back in the van, I reassured myself that I wasn't alone as other people had no idea either! We learned that during the last glacial period, the sea was around 180m lower than current levels, which meant 18,000 years ago, GBI was attached to the Coromandel peninsula.
We were staying at a Christian camp in Orama, where we sorted ourselves into rooms, convened to be inducted, and then waited for the dinner gong to sound. Upon the first peal, we assembled en masse in the dining room (our group and several others also staying there) and waited for grace to be said. The food was delicious - vegetable nut roast and chips. When I asked for the vegan option, I was greeted with "so you're the vegan" to which I smiled broadly and said "yes, thank you for cooking for me". It seems politeness and enthusiasm go a long way in the world of catering: my meals and puddings became progressively better over the course of the week!
That night, we met upstairs in the ad-hoc lecture room to hear George give an overview of the week and a brief history of the island. He introduced a few of the graphs we would be expected to produce and at the dendrogram he asked if anyone had seen one before. My hand slowly goes up. "Only the computer scientist has, then". That was encouraging. I don't know my plants, but I do know my graphs!
The next day we had breakfast, made lunch, and headed to Glenfern Sanctuary just south of Orama. There we had a 15 minute lecture on the sanctuary and what it's for and then hiked up the hill to overlook the landscape. At this point, I declared Y my official photographer! We had previously been separated into groups and given equipment, including a plant identification book, and so as a group (mine with George) we headed towards the big kauri tree learning plants as we went along. Turns out my group - S my roommate and R - were pretty well-versed on their plant ID already. George's other group was B (probably knows every species in NZ ever) and T (also not bad). So, guess who got picked on? After two hours of "alright, sweeeeeet Caroline doo doo doo, what's this one?" I had a pretty good idea of how to identify ten plants. Now, that doesn't sound a lot, but I had to not only learn how to ID then, but I had to remember the names - names which my ears had never once been privy to!
Everyone reconvened at the giant kauri with a treehouse so we went 4 at a time across the rope bridge to look out over the forest canopy. S pointed out a giant Knightia Excelsa from the kauri - the leaves of which, fairly obviously, look like green swords. We ate lunch and then watched George unsuccessfully try to core a tree. He eventually succeeded, a neat demonstration of how unpredictable field work can be!
We were split off into groups again and S, R and I broke through the bush to the first data collection point. This was in practice for the full day tomorrow. We were using a heavily altered PCQ method, a plotless data collection method (the proof for which is heavily mathematical and the paper was written by computer scientists. too many integration signs for my liking). This entails sticking a stick in the ground which has two bits of plastic you set perpendicular to each other. They demarcate your quarters. First thing:
George gave the evening lecture and talked about where the various groups would be the next day - ours was completely different to what everyone else was doing and he warned us that our path would be arduous. We socialised for a bit and then headed off to bed!
G was kindly enough to walk me to the ferry terminal at half six in the morning, helping me to carry one of the bags. The class boarded the ferry, and I secured myself a comfortable seat on the deck and fell asleep for a good few hours. Almost suitably refreshed, the heavens decided to open and we were forced to the shelter just behind the engine room. That did not go so well. My soon-to-be-roommate, S, spent the next hour and a half puking. I sat out front groaning and moaning for a bit until I spotted GBI and instantly became excited for the week ahead.
We piled off the ferry and into the vans where we slowly made our way to the accommodation, stopping half a dozen times for George, the lecturer, to point out various things about the landscape through which we were driving. When he talked about plant species, I was at a complete loss as to what on earth he was saying. Back in the van, I reassured myself that I wasn't alone as other people had no idea either! We learned that during the last glacial period, the sea was around 180m lower than current levels, which meant 18,000 years ago, GBI was attached to the Coromandel peninsula.
We were staying at a Christian camp in Orama, where we sorted ourselves into rooms, convened to be inducted, and then waited for the dinner gong to sound. Upon the first peal, we assembled en masse in the dining room (our group and several others also staying there) and waited for grace to be said. The food was delicious - vegetable nut roast and chips. When I asked for the vegan option, I was greeted with "so you're the vegan" to which I smiled broadly and said "yes, thank you for cooking for me". It seems politeness and enthusiasm go a long way in the world of catering: my meals and puddings became progressively better over the course of the week!
That night, we met upstairs in the ad-hoc lecture room to hear George give an overview of the week and a brief history of the island. He introduced a few of the graphs we would be expected to produce and at the dendrogram he asked if anyone had seen one before. My hand slowly goes up. "Only the computer scientist has, then". That was encouraging. I don't know my plants, but I do know my graphs!
The next day we had breakfast, made lunch, and headed to Glenfern Sanctuary just south of Orama. There we had a 15 minute lecture on the sanctuary and what it's for and then hiked up the hill to overlook the landscape. At this point, I declared Y my official photographer! We had previously been separated into groups and given equipment, including a plant identification book, and so as a group (mine with George) we headed towards the big kauri tree learning plants as we went along. Turns out my group - S my roommate and R - were pretty well-versed on their plant ID already. George's other group was B (probably knows every species in NZ ever) and T (also not bad). So, guess who got picked on? After two hours of "alright, sweeeeeet Caroline doo doo doo, what's this one?" I had a pretty good idea of how to identify ten plants. Now, that doesn't sound a lot, but I had to not only learn how to ID then, but I had to remember the names - names which my ears had never once been privy to!
Everyone reconvened at the giant kauri with a treehouse so we went 4 at a time across the rope bridge to look out over the forest canopy. S pointed out a giant Knightia Excelsa from the kauri - the leaves of which, fairly obviously, look like green swords. We ate lunch and then watched George unsuccessfully try to core a tree. He eventually succeeded, a neat demonstration of how unpredictable field work can be!
We were split off into groups again and S, R and I broke through the bush to the first data collection point. This was in practice for the full day tomorrow. We were using a heavily altered PCQ method, a plotless data collection method (the proof for which is heavily mathematical and the paper was written by computer scientists. too many integration signs for my liking). This entails sticking a stick in the ground which has two bits of plastic you set perpendicular to each other. They demarcate your quarters. First thing:
- Record the aspect by orienting yourself in the direction you think water would head and take a bearing.
- Record the slope by sending R down the hill and looking just above her head (she's shorter) through the inclinometer and trying to read the results whilst keeping it steady and both eyes open (quite tricky to get used to!)
- Record all saplings around the stick by yelling "OI! S, what's this?"
- Record the height by looking up and guessing. Democratically decide based on the average of all three guesses.
- Find the nearest tree with a trunk over 5cm diameter at breast height (DBH).
- Measure and record the distance to the tree and the DBH.
- Record its species and the species of the next nearest >5cm DBH.
- If a tree fern was actually the nearest >5cm at 1m tall, record its species (and measure it if >3m tall).
- Guess which species looks like it will take over when the tallest tree dies.
George gave the evening lecture and talked about where the various groups would be the next day - ours was completely different to what everyone else was doing and he warned us that our path would be arduous. We socialised for a bit and then headed off to bed!
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