Back to School

It was my first day of school since being on the island and it wasn’t quite as bad as some of the first days of school that I’ve had. The class that I am taking is taught by my professor, Greg Bruland, and is Natural Resources and Ecology Management 301. It is a class that looks at different environments, coastal, forest, marine, etc. and sees how resources are being managed around the world, and how they should be managed to best support society. Today, as an introduction, we defined and discussed renewable vs nonrenewable and sustainable vs unsustainable resources. I really liked the class and wish I could stay to take it the whole semester. This afternoon I went into the lab to work on ball-milling some soil samples before we headed out to the last site we didn’t make it to on Friday. I also worked on trying to program a gamecam to put out when we go back into the field on Friday in order to capture footage of the pigs in action. The final plot was Waahila Ridge and was on this beautiful pine ridge way up in the mountains. We did some fence and runoff collector repairs and activated it for the January rain event. We also gathered soil samples to practice running a moister content in the lab. When we returned to the lab Greg showed us the procedure for calculating moister content and total suspended solids in the soil and runoff respectively. It is amazing how fast the day moves when you are busy, and I can’t believe I have already been here five days, the time is flying by.