We are the Pinch Testers, we study different types of soils by taking our fingers and pinching them and differentiating the composition of the soil. As we woke up this morning a surprise was waiting outside. We walked out the door and it was snowing! So unfortunately no pinch testing today. However we are finished with our fieldwork so we don’t have to go outside.
Yesterday in our fieldwork we taped off boundaries around an area for measuring the diameter of trees so that we could determine the smallest to largest size of trees and take data about them. This data will help us to determine the age and health of those trees which will give us insight into which of them are more likely to fall in windy conditions. The extra pieces of information that we took about these trees were their conditions which were if they were burned, standing, or alive, and if they had parasites or mistletoe. To determine the age of the trees we took cores from the trees and plan to count the rings. After we collected all the data we decided to collect more information about the trees from the sap from fallen trees. We went around with petri dishes and scraped sap into three individual dishes, and today we will attempt to test the sugar content and pH of the sap to see if any of those are correlated to the tree’s health. This evening we are going to present our results to other groups and we are excited to see what the outcomes may be!