Circles Are Better Than Lines

As Nathan mentioned, a newer and improved method of measurement was employed on the second day of tree tallying. The transect grid utilized was the same as before, however the transect lines were now used to create intersections on the land. 

Measuring the transects at the border of the plot (road=border)

Each intersection would result in a measuring spot that would be 15m in radius, to create a 148m^2 measuring area. By following a transect line to the intersection of interest (versus trying to walk 5m apart in a straight line down a hill), we were able to more accurately find the measuring point of interest.  

Tape from the road was walked in a relatively straight line to each intersection point. #accuracy

Sometimes life gives you lemons.

Nonetheless, the growth covered landscape still provided enough obstacles to interrupt the seemingly flawless tape-walking-to-measuring-point method. Even so, the new method also provided a much simpler and easier means of counting the trees. Walking in a circle with a fixed15m tape, and counting trees inside of it, proved to be much more consistent than the traveling human transect used in the tree counting 1.0 blog post.


One of the issues Nathan and I ran into dealt with the dispersion of trees in our plot. One of the randomly selected intersections provided us coordinates to an area on the hill that contained substantially less trees than any other spots counted. Oh well.

Leonardo DiCaprio has more Oscars than this plot of land has trees.

-Jeff