-Weed Transects: Targhee National Forest & the Lamar Valley
-Lynette and Jackie have found the transect in the smoky Lamar Valley.
Outline: Throughout the summer the crew worked on weed transects both in the Targhee National Forest and the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone. These transects were randomly generated using GIS software perpendicular to the right-of-ways (roads and trails) in the area and were both 2 kilometers and 500 meters long. The transects were walked with the Trimble GeoXT GPS unit. Whenever a weed patch was found, a GPS point was created in the rover file and the following weed data was recorded in the data dictionary:
- patch length and width- percent canopy cover of the weed
- weed density per meter
- cover type (trees/grass)
- type of patch: (scattered plants, new infestation, large scale/good natives)
- disturbances
These transects will be used to create a vegetation model to identify areas within an ecosystem that could be spread vectors and/or prone to future weed colonization. The transect data will also be used to observe long-tem changes in the area. In future years, the same transects will be repeated and the data will be compared with data from this summer.