This September we started a pilot run for a new monitoring project. We would like to understand the forest dynamics a little better and will be trying to find out how connected the flowering / fruiting of our 1500+ plant species is connected to weather patterns and also presence and absence of other forest species (such as birds). A few years ago we set up the three hectare plots, but with the exception of Tom Wells, who is studying Lauraceaes, there hasn't been much interest in using those plots for any research. It would be particularly interesting to see when plants flower and bear fruits throughout the year. Through the hummingbird project (EPHI) we have a good idea on all kids of hummingbird-pollinated plants, but our forest - of course - has much more to offer. Especially in trees and herbs we know practically nothing. In order to keep the monitoring low in price, we decided to run the pilot study and a series of bio-blitzes using the bird monitoring points.
There are 129 of those in our forest which have been used for bird monitoring for 16 years (great dataset btw.). Either all or a subset of those points will be visited and for a minimum of 10 minutes all plants species that are either flowering or fruiting will be registered. There won't be time to do and exact count of flowers or fruits, so there will only be a rough categorization.
In the beginning this will be a little tricky, as we expect to find a good amount of species that we can only identify to genus or family level, but taking good fotographs and using the knowledge of some experts that we are connected with and citizen science resources (inaturalist), we hope to close that gap quickly.
The first monitoring have been done in September and the data looks good - although as mentioned currently the biggest effort is managing all the species that we cannot identify that that level.
In parallel we are doing the same with fungus. This might be - from the perspective of finding out new things - even more interesting, but it is also much more difficult, as most fungi are invisible during most parts of the year (especially in dry season) and our knowlege on fungus is very limited. Here in most cases we won't even get anywhere near family or genus level, so we will need expert help even more urgently here.
If anyone out there is intersting in helping, financially or with knowlege on the species ... or with hints and ideas on the methodology (with more money we could of course do fancier things), please contact us!
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