“Field’s” Trip canceled after winter storm hits Lexington and surrounding areas

By:

Adrian Hudson

FOR 480 Week of January 21-25, 2008

What would have been the second trip out to the field was canceled due to some nasty weather. Most of the class was still willing to go out and work but the roads were very slick and dangerous. In order to get to the field site you have to pass through some winding roads that are narrow and the road has some steep slopes.

Morning of winter storm

The class still had work to do in the lab. We spent the morning as well as the afternoon in the computer lab working on GIS and GPS exercises. We were able to transfer our waypoints off of our GPS units onto GIS computer software to digitize our boundary lines for the work site. We also did an overview on forest inventory and what measurements we needed to take at our preliminary points.

Using the GIS software

The goal for the week was to get prepared for the upcoming week in the field because we are doing preliminary points and taking inventory to determine the number of total collection points that we need for the total tract inventory. The best part of the week was when each group had their plan ready for the upcoming week. Everyone had their preliminary points on a topography map and the best part of the scenario was the points were saved on the GPS units so we don’t have to use the compass and pace method to find the points that we are looking for.

This week we were in contact with Andrew Whittle our teaching assistant that we just met along with Dr. Tamara Cushing and Dr. Lhotka. Mr. Whittle helped us with GIS troubleshooting; Dr. Cushing helped us with forest inventory, and Dr. Lhotka helped us with GPS, GIS, and forest inventory. This class project will be very time consuming and will take much work from each member of our groups to get us through the semester.

Andrew and Dr. Lhotka putting on a GIS seminar

This week I learned how to combine GIS and GPS to get successful information. There was a mistake found this past week and we are gong to have to redo a boundary marker with the GPS unit. It would have been nice to avoid these mistakes so we could save time, but every human is accident-prone.