Fieldwork

Our second entry on the Atacama trip may or may not be posted before we return to the US, but in the mean time we will plug on with everything else we have been doing. On Sunday night we returned to Santiago after a very full 6 days of fieldwork at Viña Caliterra in the Colchagua Valley. For this week my field assistant (also my wife) and I tromped around the vineyard of Caliterra and its

surrounding forests doing forest inventory plots – basically taking measurements of trees and bushed within a series of 10x30m rectangles placed through the forest land. It rained on us one day and was quite cold in the mornings and evenings. Often to get to our plots we had to hike through dense, spiny forests (one of the common trees is actually called Espino, which means spine), over steep ground and then crawl through said spiny forests to measure the exact diameter of any plant with any semblance of a trunk. All in all I found it a very satisfying experience and a nice break from city life. Anna may view it slightly differently, especially our final plot on the rainy day and when I drug her to a plot perched on a 45 degree slope.

One of the best perks about working at this location is that the vineyard put us up in their guesthouse. So instead of staying at a hostel, paying exorbitantly for a nice hotel or staying in a freezing, questionably clean cabaña (cabin) - all about 30 minutes away from the field site - we got to stay on site with clean sheets, a wood burning stove and house keeper. Yep that’s right, a woman came in every day, made our beds, replenished the firewood and served us breakfast in the morning. Definitely a unique twist to our fieldwork experience. Oh yeah and they gave us some wine (but don’t tell anyone).

Ok so why exactly are we crawling around in the forest in the middle of winter (yes it is winter, no 4^th of July BBQs for us this year)? What exactly is my project again? I’ll give you two answers to this question that I have been developing for different audiences. Ask me again in a couple of months and I’m sure it will be somewhat different. If you are interested in the details and have some knowledge of landscape ecology jargon, I’ll email you a third answer.

The quick one-liner for loud venues or for the polite but uninterested:

- I am looking at undeveloped (remnant) habitats and bird biodiversity within vineyards to further conservation within the “working landscapes”.

For the truly interested with some knowledge of environmental issues, but without a graduate degree in ecology:

- To help lessen the impacts of climate change some governments are starting to pay landowners to maintain or plant trees on their lands (e.g. between vineyard blocks) to pull CO2 out of the air and store it within plant material and the soil. While this is a positive for the global environment it may or may not benefit the local ecology. For example, a land owner could potentially maximize his/her carbon dollars by cutting down a native forest with varying amounts of carbon and replace it with a plantation of Eucalyptus trees (native to Australia rather than Chile or California) that contains a uniform and high amount of carbon. In the future these carbon payments are likely to extent to landowners in Chile and California and vineyard owners have the potential to be among the beneficiaries. For my project I am characterizing the carbon storage of a Chilean vineyard and its surrounding native habitat and seeing how bird biodiversity is associated with this carbon storage. Results from this study could help inform how carbon payment policies are designed so that they better encourage preservation of overall habitat quality rather than maximizing carbon storage alone.