Greetings from down south! Ethan, Emma E, and Tess headed down for a quick circuit of field work right after finals ended for the semester. We drove a nice little loop from Charlottesville to Huntsville AL, then over to Atlanta, and back up to Cville.
For our travels we were looking for leaves from blackgum in order to do DNA extraction and then genome sequencing of the sampled trees. Our goal here is to understand how wild individuals of blackgum are related to urban individuals, and particularly those individuals who are planted out via the nursery trade in urban settings.
We were down in Alabama at the Paint Rock Forest ForestGeo and Preserve site, and thanks to the fabulous help of Helen and Patience, we had a long but successful day in the field after some hectic weather the day before!
A UTV ride up and down the Cumberland plateau is a great way to wake up in the morning, and getting the leaves was great and all, but the best part… seeing FOUR LIVE ARMADILLOS!?!?!
And looking into two crazy sinkholes. Like… a sinkhole, surrounded by maidenhair fern and fairybells and miterwort and cohosh… dream world!
Anywho, we wrapped up in Alabama after one day of field work (fueled by Tupelo Honey <3), and then headed over to Atlanta to collect some leaves from city parks! This went relatively seamlessly (thanks Trees Atlanta for the map of all of the blackgum!), and we wrapped up around 4pm and settled into our campsite for the night.
One thing about me… I’m going to enjoy myself wherever my field travels take me. So, as a first time venturer to Atlanta, I was hereby required to go to the Georgia Aquarium on our day off. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Whale shark! Like what.
Now, the leaves and all of us are back up in Virginia, and looking forward to a trek to New York in June!