Day 9: Data Collection Continues

Everyone was up bright and early as usual. With our new set stations in the kitchen breakfast and lunch making went fairly smooth and a lot faster than yesterday. Avocados are a new staple here which makes me very happy! We left earlier than yesterday which was nice because it was a lot cooler. Some of us were dropped off near our “base station” near the Moai and others were taken further up into the valley. Kerry and I worked our way down into the coast and collected several data points along the way. With a new idea of what our final product should be we didn’t focus too much on logging every road, since Ecognition will allow us to classify all objects similar to be the same.

At the beach we focused on sand color, size of the grain, and predominant wash up (plant, shell, rock). We noticed many rock walls and decided to categorize it under rock-piles, in the features we included anthropogenic or natural; these rock barriers would be listed as anthropogenic. So far the only sand color we’ve seen is brown and grain size has been fine. I’m curious to see if we can go back to the beach and wade into the water a little bit. If the sand becomes coarser as we move into the water, that’s probably a sign that there is a coral bed nearby.

Here is a very cool rock we spotted while on the beach!

We also continued to collect points of the roads and finally encountered a dirt road, which is good, and a few more gravel. After venturing off into a gated area, we discovered a series of ponds. Some ponds seemed to serve the purpose of drinking holes for the animals found on the property; others may have been part of a marsh that we ran into when trying to find a shortcut back to the beach. Even if collecting water features isn’t a part of our immediate data collection, we decided to take down points so we could share them with the hydrology group.

After a long day out in the field it was finally time to go home! We were all drained and ready for dinner! Before we could think about dinner though, we downloaded our new data and exported the file to ArcMap so we could give the grad students a general idea of how much area we’ve covered.