Getting our daily dose of traditional New Orleans Jazz
Meeting Mark Schleifstein, NOLA.com
Today we were lucky enough to meet with Mark, an environmental reporter for NOLA.com: New Orleans’ leading website for news and information. He runs their hurricane blog and is solely responsible for reporting news related to all things environmental, weather, levee, and hurricane related.
See his blog here.
He predicted a hurricane with devastating effects like Katrina three years before it hit in his series titled “Washing Away“.
Po’ Boys and Music Talk
Thanks Mark for the talk! It was great to get an inside look at how a record label is operated in New Orleans. And deep fried pickles are my dream food.
BP Oil Chat with Michael Blum
Visited Dr. Blum at Tulane University, discussed the 2010 BP oil spill in greater detail.
A break from the action
Looking up one of the man made drainage canals brimming with life. Turtles, frogs, snakes, lily pads and much more.
Growth of Invasive Trees
Part of our work saving the bottomland hardwood forests is quantifying just how bad our invasive woody species actually are. In that vein, we established a group of marked (natural recruits) invaders out on our Trail C at Woodlands Trail three years ago and have been looking at their demography each year since. This allows us to estimate the rate at which these species couple take over the canopy if left unchecked.
We have marked all of our trees with spray paint and located their exact positions with our sub-meter GPS. Last year we had the brilliant idea to actually put numbered aluminum plant tags on these suckers. The only issue we discovered this season was the growth rate of these trees is such that these wires holding the metals tags to the tree sometimes could not keep up with the phenomenal growth in the girth of these trees.
Armadillo soup anyone ?
These little fellas seem to be quite common, but we cant seem to see a live one.
Day 6
Today’s southern sunset was amazing. Can’t beat sunsets like this. Especially after a long days work.