Day 15

Today I tried to look for relevant articles for my project and worked on merging all of the shapefiles from the three days (we lost our data for one of the days) that the vegetation group went out to the Ka’a’awa Valley to collect data. It was difficult to combine all of the data because the attribute table of the merged shapefile kept getting messed up.

Around 11am, I went to the Ka’a’awa Valley with Paul, Shelby, and Courtney so that I could meet the botanist who was supposed to come at noon. He ended up arriving around 1:30pm and the vegetation group and a few other students as well as all of the professors went with the botanist to identify the unknown plants that the vegetation group had difficulty identifying. The botanist was very helpful because he pointed out the plants that were native as well as those that were known to be most invasive plants in the world. He also pointed out plants that he assumed would occur in pure patches due to the nature of each of the plant’s growth. I feel that this information would have been very useful when we started but I am still really glad that we had a chance to meet with the botanist.