Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Alpine larch

A call from Don Pigott from Yellow Point Propagation provided a much needed excuse for a subalpine escape. Don wanted mature larch cones. The details were to find a sample of viable seeds from 10 individuals in two separate stands. Adrian Leslie and I decided to pick a relatively close by and familiar location to look for some these samples - above Whitewater ski hill, in Ymir Basin.
Leaving the ski runs below Ymir Basin



Adrian and Ellie looking for trees that had cones
 Once up to the shorter trees that we could access with our pruning pole, we discovered that other seed predators were well at work.

Adrian inspecting a poorly developed cone
 This critter was probably Strobilomyia macalpinei, something that I found a fair amount of in the stands I suveyed in the Rockies.
A problem...fly larvae were already harvesting the seeds!

An old vet..
















This was a classic open, timberline stand, where avalanche disturbance and deep spring snow packs allowed the larch to continuously regenerate among surviving older seed producers. The other high elevation species, spruce, fir, and whitebark pine were relegated to protected ribbons below rock outcrops, or mature larch groups. 









In the end, a dissapointing cone crop - but a beautiful day out in the mountains and great break from the office!

Me clipping off cones, using a pruning pole.

Another cone with a smaller larvae instar

Two well developed cones, and a short shoot that couldn't make up its mind whether to be a cone or a branch

A local resident (marmot) checking us out

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Orientation 2012

Well, we're at it again for 2012! So far there there are 85 new students spread over four diploma and one degree program in the School. We've had the College wide orientation, our own get together with first and returning second year students, the first week of field trips, forestry bridge installations, getting to know LANs, servers, and GIS.
SEG faculty assistant, Leanne Reitan and I, manning the orientaiton both

new students vying for cross-cut champions title!

Our new SEG crowd getting treasure hunt instructions
For me, it's been a lot learning in my new role as the Chair of the SEG. I've been getting to know a whole lot of College staff that I never really appreciated before - an eye opener!

Friday, February 3, 2012

A New Year.

Feb 2012 - It's been a busy time since Field School last spring. Right now I'm a month in teaching a revitalized forest ecology - now terrestrial ecology and biology course. For the first couple of weeks students and I have been out on the college campus learning how to identify shrubs in winter,

measuring different tree plantations, and observing evidence of out-of-season wildlife wandering around in the warmer temperatures that we've experienced this January.




more recently, this class  moved up to the Nancy Greene Lake area, west of Castlegar, to examine forest structure and ways of measuring site productivity.

Folks have been busy staring through prisms, rapping DBH tapes around trees, estimating stand ages, and generally having fun! Students will find the hard part settling down in the computer lab to restle with data that has been collected over the next few weeks...