Pine beetles and noxious weeds!
August 2, 2013 2:51 pm Leave your thoughts
After wrapping up the marginal ground project a couple weeks ago, I have been pretty busy, hence the overdue blog entry! FP Innovations left Grande Prairie to analyze the collected data and will eventually publish the results of the trial project, which should be interesting to read once released! Also, one of the equipment operators was kind enough to take us all for dinner to celebrate the end of the project!
The three different skidders used for the marginal ground project – the middle one is a 6 wheeler!
Tigercat 630D skidder – I even got to take it for a spin!
I spent last week with Dale, getting exposure to mountain pine beetle work. We have pine beetle stations set up in different areas around our forest management area to monitor beetle populations – each station has 3 traps, each with a cup at the bottom. Each cup has an insecticide tablet-like object in it which kills the bugs – live bugs would be a lot harder to count! There were tons of other creepy crawlers in the cups other than pine beetle too! The cups are counted and emptied on a weekly basis and the numbers are passed onto the provincial government. Depending on the location and recent weather, some stations would have just a couple beetles while some would have close to 2,000!
A wood wasp I found inside one of the beetle trap cups!
A mountain pine beetle station – three traps with cups filled with all sorts of bugs!
The first two days this week, I worked on an ongoing ArcMap project at the office and helped organize some of the silviculture herbicide maps. On Wednesday, I tagged along for a safety and environmental audit with one of our contractors – confirming that necessary safety precautions and standards were being met. Today and tomorrow, I’m working with a fellow summer student to remove scentless chamomile, a noxious weed, from a section of our roads to prevent further spreading.
Until next time!
