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Class
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A biodiversity plot is one hectare of wooded land. Dr. John Tole, school board chair, has offered the use of a hectare of wooded land on his property for what will be an ongoing study. One hectare of land measures 100 meters by 100 meters. It is divided into 20 meter quadrants to reduce the study area for each class. The students have tagged, measured, mapped and identified all the trees in five quadrants, that leaves 20 to go. They spent several days during the latter part of October on the project, and classes alternated days.
“The neat thing for me,” Rissler said, “is that I’m supposed to teach them about plants and how we affect the environment and now we have a hands-on project which we can refer back to during say the winter months when we’re in the classroom. They will remember and associate what we did there and what we talk about in class.”
The task of identifying trees also coincided with the students’ annual leaf collection and tree identification project. Each tree in each quadrant was identified and measured for DBH (the diameter of the trunk at breast height. A tree has to be a least four centimeters in diameter to qualify for study.
In the spring the classes will return to the area to study what has transpired during the winter. They will look at the percent of canopy cover and ground cover. A healthy forest is mostly green with little ground cover in the spring, Rissler said. The sites are also very different from each other some have more pine trees, others have more hardwood trees, and some just more or less trees altogether which produce different results.
The idea is, the more variation of species in an area the better the health of the ecosystem we are living in will be,” Rissler said. “If there are 35 or
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