If the countryside is not green it is dying

If the countryside is not green it is dying
Originally uploaded by botanize

I knew that California has a Mediterranean climate. I know that means cool wet winters and warm dry summers. I know how important that may be for the evolution of grains. But I didn't really know what that means.

"But Adam, looking out over his dry dust-obscured land, felt the panic the Eastern man always does at first in California. In a Connecticut summer two weeks without rain is a dry spell and four a drought. If the countryside is not green it is dying. But in California it does not ordinarily rain at all between the end of May and the first of November. The Eastern man, though he has been told, feels the Earth is sick in the rainless months."

- John Steinbeck - East of Eden

The end of a long day (with incubations)

The end of a long day (with incubations)
Originally uploaded by botanize

Science is tiring. The boxes behind me contain 16 2-liter flasks full of filtered stream water plus a bacterial inoculant. I'm going to track the concentrations of various forms of nitrogen and carbon of the course of two weeks to determine how much of it is usable by bacteria. At the end of the two weeks I'll have hundreds of small vials of frozen water that will keep me busy for quite a while. And of course, it doesn't end there. I have a few other things I'm going to try to do with the water left over, because with science, there's always something else you can do.

Filtered samples for ammonium analysis

Filtered samples for ammonium analysis
Originally uploaded by botanize

After filtering water for hours I took 40ml from each site to analyze for ammonium, a form of nitrogen that bacteria, algae and plants prefer. I also saved another 60ml to send back to minnesota to analyze for nitrate and total nitrogen. Using these numbers I'll be able to estimate the relative importance of different forms of nitrogen for the stream food web.

Filtering water samples

Filtering water samples
Originally uploaded by botanize

At the bottom of this picture you can see the top of a flask, with a rubber stopper and a brown plastic funnel on top of that. The flask has a nozzle on the side that I use to vacuum water through a filter in the brown nozzle. The filter blocks anything larger than 0.7µm, smaller than a typical bacterium, and about the same size as the wavelength of red light. Small!

Field work!

Collecting water samples
Originally uploaded by botanize

Yesterday I went to seven sites, spent 4 hours collecting 32 liters of water. This was at the South Fork Eel near Ten Mile Creek. We missed the turnoff on the path and ended up a ways up Ten Mile. Finding our way back to the Eel took 45 minutes and felt like an Indiana Jones adventure, but without the mysticism.