The Temple of Doom

Very very long day. 9 to 5 on your feet in the sun, while awesome, takes it out of you. Add on to that a 2 hour lecture on the geology of Kauai in the evening and it made for a very early bedtime. The day was good though despite natures best efforts. We started off using the spectroscope to get a reading for the type of colors reflected by each plant with the idea that we could then match this to our results from the UAVs. This is already a slow process but the random rain showers and on and off cloud cover meant that we got very little done other than getting more of an introduction to the technology. The afternoon was spent on a beautiful cliff top walk to a collapsed old temple where we took GPS readings of several native and invasive species for later use. Most of our work today was meant to assist us in interpreting future data from our upcoming aerial photography.

The day of course concluded with the aforementioned lecture by Chuck Blay where we learned about the hotspot which has spawned Kauai and many many other islands and what other smaller forces worked to shape the island we are studying.