Someone (**cough** **cough** Morgan) fell down on their job rebloging the Portal Project 40th anniversary posts to Jabberwocky. But that means this week is the week o’ Portal as we reblog the various posts from the past few weeks. First up, what happens when we go out in the summer to count plants?
Twice a year the Portal crew gets a little larger, and spends a few extra days, and we count plants on all 384 quadrats. Despite some of us being in our second decade of visiting the site, and everyone on the plant crew being intimately familiar with most of the species at the site, and that the rodent RA has been watching the plants grow and giving us monthly updates, we still never really know what we’re going to find once we get out there. The desert does what it wants.
The uncertainty seems especially high for the summer plant community. Some years we arrive to an ocean of grass, waving in the breeze. Those are the years we spend a lot of ‘quality time’ with each quadrat. Other years we arrive to a dustbowl. We walk around the site laying our PVC quadrat down and picking it back up…
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Jabberwocky Ecology 