If you like brown...

...I was told, then you'll love Yuma, AZ!

Well, I've never really considered brown to be one of my favorite colors, but Yuma was still great! I've got some great pictures on my lab's digital camera (at least, they look great in the little view screen). Hopefully I'll get those online for you guys within the next couple of days.

Yuma is in the extreme southwest corner of Arizona, so we flew into San Diego and drove across California to get there. The drive was about 2.5-3 hours. It was really cool! There were major changes in the plant communities as we got away from the maritime influence and into increasing aridity. I saw so many cool cacti! Including tons of saguarro!

We got to Yuma at around 3:30 on Wednesday, checked into our hotel, and then headed to the base to get our IDs and photo passes (you have to have special permission to take pictures on the base). Now I have an official DoD contractor ID badge! Apparently the base my study site is on is the place where they test all of the artillery and bombs and such that the army uses. They don't actually have any troops stationed there. So we had to watch a 10 minute safety briefing video. Same old same old really. Don't go into fenced areas (land mines... bad news)... Don't touch or pick up anything that looks man-made as it might be unexploded ordnance... Watch out for cacti and poisonous animals... A complication, however, is that you have to be pretty careful and keep in touch with range control to make sure they know where you are and that you don't go into any areas where they're going to be shooting things or test driving tanks. Fortunately, we made it without getting blown up! We did hear some explosions, however, and saw some guys parachuting from airplanes.

On Thursday we got started with the real work. Tim, the base's environment guy tagged along with us, acting as our guide and plant id guru. Thursday was a perfect day. It was relatively cool (only 90), and not very windy. We trekked all over the northern half of my flightlines on the lookout for 4 bushes: Salt Cedar (Tamarix spp.), Creosote (Larrea tridentata), Iron Wood (Olneya tesota), and Palo Verde (blue: Cercidium floridum and yellow: Cercidium microphyllum). Pictures of all of these will follow. Of course, since the spatial resolution of my images is 4m pixels, we had to look for big individuals. (Except for Tamarix, which can get gigantic, and form humongous monospecific clumps in addition.) Most of the vegetation that's visible in the image is in dried washes (which are ephemeral watercourses whenever it rains), so that's where we spent most of our time. At around 3 we discovered that Dave had lost his ID (d'oh), so after rambling around the wash we were in taking points at bushes we had to call it a day and spend forever in bureacratic circles to get a replacement (took many times longer to get another ID than to get one in the first place).

Most of the civilian personnel at the base get Fridays off, so Dave and I were on our own that day. Amazingly, we didn't get lost or exploded. We did observe a security truck snooping around our car though. We had clearance to be where we were, so he had nothing on us. Friday was hotter, so we called ourselves done in the middle of the day and went to Dairy Queen and then swimming in the hotel pool. I hadn't brought a bathing suit, but I wasn't going to let that stop me! Lucky Dave got to see me swim in my undies ;-).

We had a great and greatly productive time. All told we GPSed about 235 plants, well scattered throughout the image. I think the neatest part, however, was finding quite a bit of Tamarix in the dry washes where Tim didn't expect it to be (he figured it would all be clustered around the irrigated agriculture. And not surprisingly, that's where it was the largest and most dominant). It really illustrated how aggressive and hardy this noxious plant is, and also demonstrates the importance of actually looking for it rather than relying on your assumptions. That's the goal of my current project: to see if we can see it from aerial imagery, and thus develop maps to direct eradication efforts. But even if I'm not successful (but I think I will be), our trip showed that just sending a small team out into the field for a couple days (or even just one) provides valuable (though incomplete) information about a species' distribution.

Yesterday we drove back to San Diego and flew back to Sacramento. So now I'm back home and have tons of work to catch up on. Yuck! I have a midterm on Wednesday, and I think I'm getting a takehome midterm for some unspecified amount of time this week too. Study study study!