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Wrapping Up for the Spruce Crew

September 30th was a bittersweet day for the spruce crew. Time had been a stressor for our last few days of fieldwork; bear hunting season was fast approaching and the leaves were beginning to turn, making tree identification a challenge. By early afternoon, Carter, Dalia, and I had finished our last survey transect of the basin at Alarka Laurel. Walking back to the car with our tools in hand, we shared a great feeling of accomplishment and pride in our efforts. But it was dawning on us that our time in the field was over.


Carter and Dalia with our biggest red spruce found in the basin.


At that point, we had spent a month surveying red spruce at Alarka Laurel in the Nantahala National Forest. The first part of our semester was straightforward. It was the farthest thing from easy, but my project partners and I knew exactly what we were doing. Each Thursday we'd drive up to Alarka and spend the day surveying, crawling through rhododendron thickets, and searching for red spruce. That night we'd camp out under an expanse of stars and play cards by the fire. On Friday we'd wake up early and put in another full day’s work, then drive back home to the station. We fell into a rhythm while working in the field, understanding without speaking just what task needed to be done and who would do it. Three strangers in August thrown into the forest became three friends in late September working to understand the plant community there.


But no longer would we spend our Thursdays and Fridays roughing it in the field. It was time to move on to a new phase of our project: data. It was a mammoth effort between the three of us to enter the thick stack of notes we had into Excel, organize it, and begin to decide what information we wanted to get out of it. That process was followed by many frustrating hours spent on R trying to code; I ended up Googling probably every other command. I once spent two full days once trying to get one silly little p-value that we didn't even end up using. Suddenly science wasn't fun anymore. Fieldwork seemed like a distant memory, back when we understood what we were doing. This was new terrain.


Learning to use R, a statistical software.


We read. A lot. Pulling out information on red spruce from dozens of scientific papers, working to make sense of our survey at Alarka. There were so many directions in that literature we could have gone in, and it put into context the vast wealth of information that's out there. So many people had put blood, sweat, and tears into understanding red spruce just like us.


Then came the writing process. Putting our work into a cohesive paper with contextual information, figures, statistics, and specific explanations was a trying but ultimately rewarding process. We spent way too much time arguing over word choice and sentence structure, but it’s because we cared. It had been months of hard work to get to that point, and we all wanted to do justice to the intense labor we had put in.


Carter, about 4 feet off the ground, attempting to walk above "laurel hell."


After turning in our first draft, we got feedback from our mentors, and then came another round of edits. And then another. And now we're working on our final draft. It's been an intensive semester to get to this point, and there's still more work to be done before we finalize our project. But the brunt of the work is done. 383 adult trees measured. 662 seedlings and saplings. Over 3 acres surveyed. Countless bruises and scratches. And one bear sighting.


It feels good to work so intensely on something I genuinely care about with two people who share my passion. Our work is important; Alarka features an isolated population of red spruce near the southern end of their range. Understanding this population's response to climate change could be telling for the species as a whole, which is huge. Science is hard, and plant ecology is a tricky subject. But our excitement for what we were doing has carried us through. And at the very least, I now know way more about red spruce than I ever thought I would.


Carter and Dalia walking back to the car after a long day of fieldwork,

sometime in early September.


- JH


P.S. please read Dalia's blog post from October 16 as well! She did a beautiful job of documenting the day-to-day of what our fieldwork looked like.

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