I went to Brazil for the summer, which meant that I couldn’t totally finish the herbaceous (i.e., no woody stems) plant sampling in the area of forest I’m studying until now. I have partial samples, and I’ve got some samples from earlier field seasons, but I was hoping I could get plants with seeds before the frost killed everything. And now I’m screwed.
It’s pretty early for frost where I am. We usually wouldn’t see it until the middle or the end of the month. All I’d need to finish the work I need to do would be about a week more of no frost. But no such luck. So now my thesis might be screwed.
Any chance you can bring these plants inside for the evening? Probably not.
Any chance you could cover up the plants with a tarp or blanket or something that might keep them just warm enough overnight (don’t laugh, I’ve seen it done before).
Covering plants with tarps or blankets does indeed work. Standard practice in gardens up here, assuming you actually want to get any tomatoes or peppers. If it’s a really light frost, spraying water on the plants can work as well, if you do it as it’s freezing. Not sure how feasible any of this would be in this situation, though.
The blanket trick also works on cars that have a little trouble starting in cold weather. Just a little tip if you’re living somewhere where you don’t have a garage, and it’s just a tad inconvenient to park the car in your room.
You can make a mini greenhouse by stapling thick clear plastic sheets, such as that used to cover floors while painting, to some stakes in the ground. You may have to replace it every so often, but unless it’s a bitter winter it will hold enough heat in for the plants to survive.
Ah, the “Biology Waits For No One” scenario. I feel for ya, kiddo.
Is this a plant survey? I know you’re studying carabid populations in a disturbed environment. Grab some friends and go sample like a maniac. If it’s a mixed understory and the frost was not too hard, you may have lucked out. If not, you should still be able to identify the plants by seed. But go sample!
When I was a grad student, I went out in the field with a friend who was studying a Pinyon Jay colony. As we were driving up to her study site, we saw a Northern Harrier fly out of a pinyon pine. Uh-oh. The BOP had systematically gone through her colony, wiping it out. Not exactly the kind of data she wanted, but she was still able to weave it into her story of life at the edge of a population range.
Recently, I’ve been sampling birds at horse farms while a friend takes hourly samples of mosquitoes off of horses. Throughout the night, she aspirates mosquitoes out in a field, and then drags the horse into a shed and samples there. (I get to snooze since I sample the birds in the afternoon and morning ) Anyway, last Friday night, the horse refused to go into the shed. He locked his legs up and no amount of pulling, bargaining nor carrot-bribery would change his mind. So, she loses those inside data points for the month at her southern site. She’ll still be able to tell her story, albeit with some missing data points.
I could tell you the story of the vasectomies I did on Black-billed Magpies. Well, let me just say that the results were less than spectacular. But even that made it into the dissertation because of the entire story I wanted to tell.
What would field work be without a major pucker event? Good luck, Scribble!
In the outhouses of the great white north, we get an occasional suprize when somebody absent mindedly closes the toilet seat lid in the dead of winter.
“Oh. Shit frost.”
For the uninitiated, it’s best to let the steam from your work evaporate, rather than condense on the seat.
I was going to say that I’m entirely jealous, what with the big weather news this next few days being lows in the low 60s and highs of about 70-75 over the weekend…but that does sound like a major pain with the plants and all.
I miss actual winter. Where I used to live in Georgia had a perfect winter for me – not too cold, and it’d snow every once in a while, at least every three years or so. Here…snow??? No way. Freeze? What’s that?
If it makes you feel any better, the frost seems to have killed/hampered whatever was floating around in the air and making my puppy itchy. She feels much better now!
Okay…so, we ended up not having frost last night. Whew. But the cold front from Canada (frickin’ Canadians, sending us their cold air! Well, I guess it’s fair trade for the pollution we send them) will be here through tomorrow. So if I get lucky, and there’s no frost tonight, either, I should be in the clear.
Thanks to everyone for their advice about how to protect plants from frost. I’ll use some of it on my garden, maybe. But I can’t go around protecting a bunch of land in the forest with tarps and such. Brachyrhynchos, yes, this is plant sampling I’m doing for my thesis. And I’ve had so many problems with the research already–the last thing I’d need is losing all my plant data. I will not hang around for another field season just so I can get the plants.
On the plus side, the cold is killing off the fleas that have been living in my apartment (my subletters left me with no keys, but with plenty of fleas. That deserves its own pit thread, though, so I won’t discuss it here.)
) Anyway, last Friday night, the horse refused to go into the shed. He locked his legs up and no amount of pulling, bargaining nor carrot-bribery would change his mind. So, she loses those inside data points for the month at her southern site. She’ll still be able to tell her story, albeit with some missing data points.