Cliff Stephens Park

Cliff Stephens is a park practically down the street from Moccasin Lake Park. It's a beautiful park filled with trees, frisbee golfers, and a small lake off to the side. The wildlife wasn't very prevalent, though we did see a Sciuridae (squirrel) eating an apple. Weather-wise it was nice outside, 89 degrees (F) and a few cute little clouds. At the park we went around to four different sites, which were not done numerically, but I will put them in order because it seems more professional.

Site One

This site was right on the small lake next to a dock. We used a drift net to collect water, finding some small yellowing grasses in the water, we then tested for the following things:

Turbidity: 46.0 NTU
Salinity: 50%
pH: 6 (slightly acidic)
Temp: 89.6F
Illumination: 642 Lux

Site Two

This site was in an open field type terrain, we set out a 30meter tape measure, and at every 10meters recorded what was touched at point intercept with a pin flag.

Pin flag 1: Grass, a type of weed, dirt
Pin flag 2: Grass, dirt
Pin flag 3: Grass, dirt

Second we put a quadrat at every 10meters and recorded what was inside.

Quadrat 1: 70% weeds; 20% dirt;10% grass
Quadrat 2: 50% grass; 45% weeds; 5% other type of weed
Quadrat 3: 50% one type of grass; 50% other type of grass

Lastly we measured the soil texture and found it to be silt loam.


Site Three

At this site there were many trees, and trust me the shade was nice. We laid down a 30meter transect and the used a Cruz-all to get an average of about 20 trees. We then used a Densitometer to get an average of 90% coverage. Lastly we measured soil texture and found it to be loamy sand.

Site Four

At this site we used a Densitometer to average the canopy coverage at 60% and then found the DBH of the surrounding trees. The size range was from 125 to 153centimeters. Lastly we used a Clinometer to find the tallest tree to be 46feet.