Cliff Stephens Parks
Friday Sept. 9, 2016
On Friday, September 9, we met at Cliff Stephens Park. It was very hot out, but the park was mostly a canopy of oak trees, so under the trees it was much cooler. There was also a disc golf course throughout the park. At this park, we practiced different types of sampling techniques in groups. There was a lake at the park, so we sampled the water in the lake and wrote down the salinity, turbidity and the pH of the lake water. We also recorded the plant and animal species in a open area of the park by running a transect line and dropping a pin flag and a quadrant every 10m.  Next we worked under the canopy. We used the cruz-all to find out different sizes of trees and counted how many were in each size category. We also used densitometers to look at the canopy cover in two different places under the canopy. The next station we recorded the DBH of a trees and also utilized a clinometer to find the height of the tallest tree in the area. The last station we marked 20 beans in a big bag and then recorded the average amount of those marked beans we got every time we grabbed a handful from the bag. It was a very interesting learning experience.