End of Semester Thoughts

 

Hey everyone!

This blog will continue to get updates, albeit much less frequently. The semester is closing out, and wow! It seems every topic has a massive amount of depth to it that I am blissfully unaware of, and Biodiversity is really deep! 

I walked into this imagining that I'd be able to thoroughly catalogue plants and animals, not just within my yard, but the wetlands as well! How foolish! 

That being said, every experience is a learning one. This course has taught me many valuable things about the tools that are so readily used in this field of work. One of the biggest barriers for me during the course was my limited access to geospatial tools. While phone technology is fantastic, my model of phone was not especially accurate, nor were the apps transcribing the data. In the end I had to manually transcribe coordinates and data into the google sheets. This was the first time I actually wrote a sheet to be transcribed into data points, and it was much less intimidating than I originally imagined it to be.

I am thrilled with the identification app Picture This. I have a yearlong subscription now and plan on using it just about everywhere I go. While there are some features I wish they'd add (plant identification tips) I am grateful for the great service they provide. It is especially helpful to me, one who is much more used to identifying animals. 

I am pleased with the slideshows I have developed as well. I know a few conservation-based groups I'd love to give a few presentations with using them. It is amazing now what I can recollect by just looking at a few pictures and short lines of text. 

A point that keeps getting more and more attention by myself, in this field of study, is collaboration. I certainly did do a decent amount of work this course, but that was largely through indirect collaboration. All the species ID'd were largely done through apps that have been developed by others. The science of ecology is all knowledge gained and shared by others. While identifying some of the plants in the yard, I had my SO tag along and she pointed out certain species that I hadn't noticed in the area. It seems that collaboration has the ability to make everything just a little bit better, especially when you are an equally enthusiastic party. 

I am surprised by the diversity of plants within our yard, and more so at the number of native species that have stayed in dominance of it thus far. Hopefully as I continue my identification and mapping journey that stays true!