Enrico Brooks

Sept 9, 2019
Cliff Stephens Park
 
                       Cliff Stephens Park is a fairly large park with a huge canopy of mature oak trees covering a lot of thick grassy areas. My parents tell me they used to take me here for family picnics when I was small, but I don't remember.There is a disk golf course here and a good size lake  and a nice bridge.I found there to be plenty of shady areas at this park also. I was excited to learn in this class we would be using lots of different tools and getting hands on experience. After breaking off into smaller groups we began our use of the tools and rotated to different stations . We collected water with a drift net , and after testing found the water to be completely fresh. We observed the soil texture, and concluded it was loam sand. We learned how measure a species population by capture ,tagging and releasing and then recapture.Beans were used as a substitute for a animal species.  We ran transect lines in open areas to record what plants and animals were present . Sadly, we found no animals ,just a lot of weeds and grass. Lastly we used a densiometer again to estimate the canopy coverage of different tree areas.
     I found this site to be very interesting and fun . I enjoyed using the different tools and I always like getting hands on experience.