damsel

aerial photo set-up

So, we have been thinking for a long time about how to take aerial photos of the plants in order to chart their growth. Thankfully, Clark, who has been a super great help on the project came up with a really good design that we tested today. The camera holder also doubles as a guillotine (just kidding) Photos will be coming soon, but in the meantime, thank you Clark! We will miss seeing you more often once the school year starts.

intruders!

On further inspection of a Sedum album plant that was looking straggly, I discovered what I believe to be a yellow-striped army worm and will hereafter refer to (him) as General Sedgwick Albert III. I scooped him up and hope to rear him to moth-hood. On another platform I found this feather... hopefully from a nice well-fed worm-eating species (sorry General).

data!

Here's an example of the data we are collecting from the platforms.  The x-axis shows that this is recent data from July.  There are mulitple y axes. First, on the left you can see preliminary data on media moisute content from 4 probes.  The spikes are from irrigation, except from on July 25th when it rained (see rain gauge volume axis that is actually an indicator of platform runoff).  We are also collecting temperature data from the media; it was nearly 100F on some days (hence the need to irrigate)