On Thursday morning of August 25, some of us students hopped into the van with Jason for our first day of internship fieldwork. We drove down the winding, nausea-inducing, road toward Alarka Laurel, North Carolina to gain a better understanding of what a tree survey entails. Three of us were assigned to complete a vegetation survey in Alarka Laurel’s forested bog (affectionately nicknamed laurel hell) and assess the condition of the red spruce (Picearubens) population there. We would be comparing our collected data with a survey done in 2007, possibly to help understand if management or restoration measures for the red spruce are needed. Our hopes along this trip were to get to know the area to the point where we could identify the trees and other plants that call this bog home and to finish our project having completed five transects across the bog.
For the three of us on the red spruce survey team, we were given two DBH (diameter at breast height) tapes, two fifty-meter measuring tapes, three orange vests (since we were surveying on hunting grounds), two blue five-meter PVC pipes, a compass, pink flagging tape, a Garmin GPSmap 66i GPS unit, and a clipboard filled with rite-in-the-rain excel sheet papers for our transect data.
After around an hour and a half of driving, we made it to the allotted basin location and our first transect starting point. Walking into the first transect, realizations were being made. This was going to be difficult, and I was intimidated. But with the help of Jason, we learned a lot about how to identify the area’s trees and how to conduct our survey. It was a good day with a lot of promise for our project moving forward.
Although every single day in the bog had a unique challenge or its own beautiful moments with them, we did have somewhat of a schedule to stick to. So, once we got more of a handle on our project after that first week, our days started to look something like this:
Around 8:30 am every Thursday since September 1, with our camping gear and survey tools in tow, we headed for Alarka Laurel’s basin. Upon arrival, we would set up our tents at our camp spot before heading into the woods.
Once we were settled at our spot we would drive a little ways, then walk with our tools to our transect coordinates. We would either find our already marked transect to continue what was started the week before or match coordinates from google maps with our GPS location and start a new transect.
In the woods, we would get smacked in the face by leaves, poked in the eye by twigs, tripped, and scratched by thorns. But also, we would take the DBH of trees within the ten-by-ten-meter plots of our transects, and take note of the understory cover which was mostly rhododendron and mountain laurel but also sometimes holly or blueberry if you’re feeling lucky. We would measure the height of every spruce seedling (below two meters in height), measure the DBH of saplings (under ten cm DBH) and measure the DBH and take the coordinates of every adult spruce tree (above ten cm DBH), assessing their health with several other tasks along the way.
Our average surveying distance would be fifty meters before lunch and fifty meters after, completing the day's work. However, for instances like the time my teammates faced a bear, or times when we felt extra energized to continue, we would finish earlier or complete more than 100 meters within the day. Our record by the last day on September 30 on transect five was 170 meters completed in one day. It was a proud moment and a happy ending. While we did great work that day, I will say fewer dead branches and tree trunks across the ground, thorns, and thick layers of rhododendron and mountain laurel will certainly do wonders for your surveying speed, which was somewhat the case that day on the tail end of our transect.
We would take turns writing down data and identifying and measuring the plants of each ten-meter plot with a lunch break in the middle of the day. We got pretty good at identifying the vegetation around us and finding cool new plants and bugs along the way. However, sometimes we would need to take pictures and refer back to the excel sheet with the help of Jason’s expertise. Here are some examples of the blurry (or sometimes quite nice actually) pictures we reported back to Jason for further inspection:
Black Locust
Sassafras
After a wonderfully hard day's work, we would retreat to the car by backtracking our transect, or by trail if a transect was completed that day, and head back to the campsite. Most of the time we would go back down the mountain to Bryson City for food, but we also bought and collected firewood for further emotional turbulence - making the fire.
Some nights the ground was just too wet, and we couldn’t make it work but we still listened to music and played games all bundled up. On other nights, mostly the last couple of trips to Alarka, we triumphed.
Between 7:00 and 8:00 am, we would wake up for another day of survey work and carry on until 2:00 pm or later depending on how we were doing that day. Then we would head back home to Highlands. Something about seeing our accomplishments in our GPS and rite-in-the-rain paper by the end of the day was so encouraging and exciting. As my team member nicely put it at the end of transect five, I wouldn’t trade this project or the time I spent in the bog with my team members for anything.
