Day 9

This morning we were greeted by the horses as we were leaving for the Ka’a’awa Valley. It looked like they were trying to get into the cars with us.   We had a full and free field day to collect any data we wanted. Yesterday we found out that our data dictionary was not best suited for the vegetation we identified in our study area but this is because we did not have a chance to modify it. We were also reluctant to modify our dictionary because that meant that we had to create our points again. Therefore we continued to log the plants we couldn’t identify in our books and marked them as unknown plants and logged them into Peter’s notebook and took corresponding pictures. We had a good routine going for most of the day but our stamina dropped significantly after trying to get to a high elevation to identify plants there. We found out that the vegetation up in the higher elevations could be classified with the wet forest class like many of the plants near the shore and lowland of the valley. The view was great so we had a early lunch while we looking out towards the ocean.

We went further into the valley today and saw some interesting plants that I’ve never seen before. I would share more photos but they are taking a long time to upload so perhaps another time. We were able to collect points on approximately half of the Valley on the North Side and plan on finishing up the other half tomorrow.