Biomass - a preview

It's been forever. Terribly sorry, but Hema'ehu has been wicked busy, what with work, eating, playing frisbee. Life is rough when the temperature never drops below 68 degrees.

There are some stellar ideas kicking around inside the ol' noggin about multi-media explorations of just what it is Hema'ehu does for a living. For the present moment, suffice it to say it involves hugging trees. Lots of trees: somewhere around 3500 greater than 5 cm DBH. We (that is, the CAO team out here in Hawai'i, not even the editorial we) are building a relationship between field-measured biomass - this is where the tree-hugging comes into play - and remote sensing. The venture started off a bit unevenly, but once we cruised past the 2000 stem mark a solid relationship emerged. It's not quite solid enough, yet, for publication, but damned if all this work will go to waste.

A note about fieldwork: it's great. That is, it is beyond excellent to be standing in a native (shoot, even an invaded) forest, with the sun dappled floor, mosses, lichens, ferns, and lianas in full view. Maybe an orchid in bloom. Birds flitting about in the overstory... ah.

However, it's the rainforest. So when it rains - it's not so good. It can be miserable. Wet, tired, mosquitos, rocks that are slippery, trunks that are slippery, falling, dropping tapes and chalk after having climbed 10 feet up to measure above a buttress... it can be dismal. And Hema'ehu ain't no fair-weather field tech, no. We're out there, day in, day out, regardless of rain or sun.

So we have mixed feelings about fieldwork. C'est la vie.