Silent Falling Tree (SFT) (Pronunciation: SfffffftttttT)
We are from Flowing Wells High School, here at Sky School. Within our group, there is Mushroom (our teacher back in Tucson), Shrugs, Mulch, Sly, Lichen, Gimpy and Sandy Clay Loam (our Sky School Instructor). Today, we wandered around a bit and made observations to get us thinking about what questions we could ask for our research projects. With all of the fallen and dead trees around us we saw lichen and moss and wanted to make our experiment to have something to do with those! After approximately 10 minutes of heated debate we finally decided to study the amount of moss versus lichen on burned and fallen trees. After going up to the fire lookout on Lemmon Rock we found different parts of the mountain that had different fires that we could use as our study sites. Our first area of choice was a location that had been burnt in the Aspen Fire of 2003. This site is near the ‘Ravens’ a popular climbing boulder and was located on a south-facing slope, an important characteristic to note for our study. Once we got there, we had much dispute about how to set-up our plots. Eventually it was settled. Mulch paced out 25 steps, using a compass to make sure he was walking a straight line. We assigned different jobs, who would look out for lichen or moss or count fallen, burned logs. So far, we found that 3 out of the 18 logs had lichen but no moss, which isn’t supporting our hypothesis. Tomorrow we go to the Bullet Fire of 2002, and the inquiry continues.