Care to go WAPing?

The first opportunity I had to do some fieldwork with my new position came about due to an agreement between Regional Services and the Wildlife Division. Due to staff changes, the Wildlife Division became responsible for checking a portion of the Regional Service's WAP (Wood Acquisition Program) submissions from private woodlot owners.

These WAP submissions indicate whether the wood buyer practiced silviculture or planted saplings on privately owned lands. It is Regional Service's responsibility to go out and check the sites (they are provided with maps and GPS coordinates). Sounds simple, right?

1. Go to site.
2. Check site for silviculture or saplings by counting trees on a grid centered on the affected site.

Piece of cake! Except...

Most forestry technicians do these in the fall, after the ferns die off, or in the spring, before everything (i.e. ferns and thorny plants) grow up. The technician who trained us to check these sites was incredulous at the thought of us doing them at the height of summer. He suggested it was as close to hell as we were ever going to get, and he wouldn't even consider doing them himself.

Both of which I was really glad to hear before we ever got started. There was an end-of-the-month deadline, so delaying them was not an option.

So we travel to the field camp (which is a fire station in central NS - great lodgings!) and got to work.

Calling it hell was being nice. I have never experienced something so awful as trudging through chest deep brush from a thinning operation, all the while getting dive bombed by horse flies that can bite through jeans. Or struggling through 6-ft tall trailing thorn vines, which wrapped around you and dug into you through jeans. Or pushing through thick, thick regrowth only to disturb a wasp's nest and get stung (5 times, through jeans). See a pattern?


The above image is me at one of our first sites... All geared up with my 1m measuring stick. I was still enjoying it at this point. That didn't last long.

Between the heat, the sweat, the blood, and the exhaustion, we managed to get the WAPs completed before the deadline. And now that I know what doing WAPs is all about, if the same opportunity comes up next year - the summer students can have at'er (unless it's in the spring, of course - then I'm game) :P

Back at it!

So it's been a loooong time since I wrote about science... that's because I was doing a bunch of short contracts, and none of them had little, if anything, to do with biology (or fieldwork). Luckily, all that has changed!

I submitted my thesis to my thesis committee at the beginning of December and ran off to Australia to explore while my committee did their thing. I got back in January, completed revisions, submitted in January and defended in February. I cranked through revisions, got my thesis in by the March 1st deadline and got back 1/2 of the winter semester's tuition. Whoot!

Andrea, Master of Science. It has a nice ring, don't you think?

Shortly thereafter, I applied for an internship with the provincial government of Nova Scotia. I interviewed (and was very sincere about my desire to work in wildlife management) and got the job! My specific position is "Population Ecologist", and I'm responsible for modelling population dynamics from harvest data for furbearers and large mammals. This information will help guide management decisions.

I also get to help out with the other programs, and assist with fieldwork when people need help... so I have interesting things to talk about again :D I'll save them for another post, but I'll leave you with a picture of one of the first places I helped out with some fieldwork (a pond near some cut overs).