summer research: field sampling

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 The spring semester is over and so is the spring insect ecology class.  Fortunately, insect ecology goes on!  Andi and Greg are SNU students who are doing a 6-week NASA-funded research project.  Andi and Greg are both "farm kids" who are comfortable walking through a herd of cows to get to their sampling plots.
 We're studying the effects of broadleaf herbicides in hay fields.  To that end we're taking measurements of the soil, plant and insect communities in treated and untreated hay fields.  Though not shown in photos, we also collected soil cores and plant samples.
 Insects will be surveyed using pitfall traps and sweep netting.  The previous two photos show Andi and Greg installing some pitfall traps (digging a hole and inserting a plastic cup trap).  Below you can see a metal cover for keeping rain out of a pitfall trap and a flag that will help us find this trap back when we return to collect the sample.  Here is a little more insight into the things one can find in a pitfall trap from my time at NEON and here are some of Jamin's reflections on pitfall trapping (among other things) in Iceland.
 After setting pitfall traps, our next step was sweep netting.  This involves sweeping a net through vegetation to collect arthropods.  It's been a very wet spring in Oklahoma and we had to wait for a window of sunny weather when the plants would be dry (the day we went out was perfect).
 The next step was to transfer the contents of the net into a bag (not as easy as it sounds :).
 This last shot is from the hay field that was not treated with an herbicide.  You can see that the density of wildflowers is much higher at this second field.

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