Cruising for kudzu

The project that I'm working on is being funded by the Department of Defense. As you may recall, this is why I had to go to a military base in Arizona last April. Similarly, I had to go to Fort Benning in Georgia last week to help groundtruth maps of kudzu.

It was a good trip. I volunteered to go since it would give me a chance to go back to GA and hang out with people. We were originally going to go in September before classes started, but that turned out to be inconvenient for the base. So I got the added bonus of missing a week and a half of classes! Yay. I'm only taking 1.5 classes this quarter, and the professor of the main one thinks I'm a "hotshot" (his phrasing), so being absent wasn't really a problem. And hey, I'll always welcome an opportunity to "miss" a class! (I've never skipped class in my life, but I've missed several. A purely semantic distinction, to be sure, but one that eases the conscience.)

So I flew to Atlanta a few days early and spent Columbus Day Weekend with my dad. This also gave me the opportunity to hop, skip, & jump over to Athens on Friday while my dad was at work. I had a great time hanging out with Miss Marianne, Talia & Elena, and Amber. But after all that schmoozing my voice was pretty scratchy! And I got guilt tripped by my dad's wife for keeping them up worrying (I didn't get back till 3am). Wouldn't've been a problem if she weren't so neurotic... Talia and I tried to go to the cemetary, but it was chained shut. How weird. It was only 6 too, I figured cemetary hours would be a sunrise to sunset kind of thing. We decided that it was closed because of football. Southerners are just crazy about football, and Saturday was the day of the Georgia - Tennessee game, so the town was brimming with lunatics. Which wouldn't be a problem if the cemetary wasn't conveniently located directly behind the football stadium... Probably those football loonies would have no qualms about disturbing the dead if it meant a better parking spot for their tailgate, hence the locking of the cemetary. That was our theory, at least. We explored a bit and eventually found the back gate to the cemetary (located in the slummy part of town where the students live), but it too was locked, and I wasn't much for breaking in.

Several days later I ate one of Ted Turner's buffalo with David. I'd forgotten that Ted had purchased a bison ranch in Montana to turn into burgers...

It was so super great to see everyone again. Especially Amber, who I honestly don't know when I last saw. You guys need to come out and visit me now! I'd gladly ditch school and the central valley to show you around my favorite parts of California.

Monday evening I had to meet Ed, a "junior specialist" (they keep changing the titles, but he's currently stuck with that lame one) in my lab, at the airport and drive to Columbus, on the Georgia - Alabama border. We spent the next 4 days categorizing the vegetation to validate the classifications Ed's made. Our basic sampling strategy is nowhere close to statistically sound, basically because given the extremely large volume of data that we have, a truly random and statistically valid sample would be impossible. So instead we drive around (on the roads that weren't being shot at) and stop the car to GPS and identify some plants whenever we feel like it. Of course, whenever this happened I'd get stared at by any passing army dudes. I was winked at at least once ;-). I'm just that sexy =P. Ok... I'm just that female... The more "chivalrous" of the army dudes (usually the older ones) would completely ignore Ed with the giant, yellow GPS unit and ask me if we had car trouble. Yes. Yes we do. We're trying to fix it with that antenna... Dorks. I think they blocked Ed from their notice because they couldn't call him "little lady".

We focused primarily on the weed species of interest (kudzu & lovegrass), but also took points of native vegetation in order to help quantify the false positive rate. To aid in this latter goal, we brought my new laptop, loaded some of the classifications on it and hooked it up to a GPS unit with it's antenna stuck to the roof of the car. (I'm sure glad I opted for the expensive battery!) It was pretty cool to watch us cruise around on the laptop. Makes me think those navigation systems might be pretty fun, although granted our accuracy was an order of magnitude better than they get and anyway, my dad said that that was the only option I wasn't allowed to choose when I got Steggie. Anyway, with the laptop we were able to find and navigate to (provided they were along a non-dangerous road) areas identified as kudzu (or lovegrass) to determine if they actually were.

The kudzu classification turned out to be pretty good. There were some false positives, but in those cases the classifier seemed to be keying in to different vines (we encountered something like 4 other vine species, which we named things like: spiney vine, yellow vine, mystery vine, other mystery vine...). I thought this was pretty exciting. I mean, there doesn't seem to be an intuitive reason for vines and trees with a full canopy to be spectrally distinct, but apparently they are. The lovegrass classification wasn't so successful. My guess is that it basically called most pixels with both significant soil and veg fractions lovegrass, so there were some pretty diverse veg types all mistaken to be lovegrass.

And now I'm back home. It's a good thing too. I would become enormously fat if I had to spend much more time in Georgia. There are so many temptations there! Chick-fil-a, Krispy Kreme, fried okra.... mmmmmmmm. We also have a $50 per diem for food expenses when we're in the field, which is just an unreasonably large amount of money. $30 would probably be more like it, and even that would allow exorbitant eating. I don't think we ever really got close to our limit, but we certainly didn't stint on things like dessert =D.

A funny thing is that I feel like I subjected Ed totally to my whims while we were there. He'd never been to Georgia before, so I kept suggesting things to give him a complete southern experience. I don't think I abused this power too much though.

Today I'm staying at home to catch up on my class. Reading about simulation models, whee... I should also email the prof and let him know what I plan on modeling. Also fun. The cats are deliriously happy that I'm home again. Mitzi keeps sitting on me, which is definitely uncharacteristically friendly for her. Even Ozzie has been more snuggly than usual. I was happy to see them again when I finally got home. I get a little paranoid about them when I'm gone for a long time. I wasn't happy to see the state of my room, however. Those monsters are total filthbags. Ozzie had covered my floor with dirt, and Mitzi had puked on my bed a few times. Oh rapture. There's nothing better than washing bedding and vacuuming right after you get home from a cross-country flight (with a connection) that you got up at 7 eastern time to make. But now my room is delightfully clean.

In 3.5 hours I can call to find out if they need me for jury duty. Such suspense... If so, I'll have to go to the courthouse tomorrow afternoon for jury selection, so I still might get off. I'll keep you posted.