greenroof in illinois collapses (click link)

phipps botany in action program

I am incredibly happy to post that I have been deemed a "botanist in action" by the Phipps Conservatory (link provided) in Pittsburgh. I am looking forward to heading up there this fall to meet other cool researchers and learn how to be better at outreach and education. I am also very happy about the extra funding they will provide for my upcoming trip to Georgia to conduct some plant photosynthesis/ water use studies.  More on all this soon.

schmutz from our black roof

This amount of deposition clogged our rain gauge on our control black roof in less than 3 months. Without testing I can only imagine that it is a combination of deposition and roof decomposition.

If we got this much accumulation from our 16 square foot experiment, imagine how much would be expelled from a roof that was to scale. In all fairness, some media and organic matter was also observed in gauges on our greened platforms, but not to this extent.

snow is melted!

and sedum sexangulare is already getting warmed up.
I really like the orange coloring. This species should be the first to flower in the spring. I am looking forward to both the flowering and the warmer weather!

melting patterns

Interesting snow pillows on the platforms are starting to melt. Curious "stripes" of bare media are noticeable on the upslope of all the platforms (draining from left to right in the photo below), except for the control ones covered in just epdm (sorry for any confusion; in the pic below this one is draining from right to left).

new rain gauges

Here's a pic of the new XXL rain gauges we would like to get to measure platform runoff; they have 40 mL(compared to the usual 5mL!) tips!!

With an extreme amount of help from Campbell Scientific I have been figuring out how we might collect data from 18 of these using their CR23X logger. There are a lot of wires involved (see pic on right), but it will work, largely due to the use of TWO multi-plexors. These are devices that basically increase the capability of the CR23X 8 fold.

first snow dec 14!