Final Vlog!!! (Thursday December 5th, 2024 A.D.)
Hi again! On Thursday 5th 2024 A.D., (as documented in the video above), I paid one final official visit to my phenology spot.
Since my visit prior to Thanksgiving break, several aspects of my phenology spot have significantly changed, the most obvious change visually being the newly fallen snow cover on the ground. That, in addition to colder temperatures, has caused most of the woody brush growing in the understory to die off, and during my visit, I observed that almost all of the buckthorn, Christmas ferns, jewelweed, bittersweet, and dogwood had perished. In addition to that, the hardwood trees present at my phenology spot (red maple and green ash) have lost the remainder of their leaves over the course of the past few weeks. However, the eastern hemlock and eastern white pines still have their needles, and seem entirely unaffected by the recent seasonal changes. Although I did not observe any berries on the barberry bushes present at my site, barberry plants typically retain their berries over the course of the winter and it is possible that I simply missed them. Besides that, there did not appear to be any other plants with persistent fruit or flowers still growing on them.
There also didn’t appear to be any signs of decomposers including fungi or earthworms, and most of the woody debris/organic litter on the forest floor looked fairly similar to how it appeared the last time I visited (minus the addition of the snow cover). I also did not observe any signs of wildlife at my phenology spot, but this is consistent with my observations from earlier this semester. The only significant change I observed related to wildlife at my phenology spot was that there seemed to be somewhat fewer birds passing by overhead (likely because many bird species in VT are migratory and have begun heading south for the winter).
Although this is my last visit to my phenology spot as required by NR1010, I plan to revisit my spot in the future, and hopefully this will not be my final blog post (although I don’t want to make any promises)! Regardless of whether or not I revisit my spot through the lens of an NR1010 student, I am grateful that I got to explore this place over the past semester and get to know it more deeply than I might have otherwise. I hope that many more UVM NR1010 students explore this spot in the future, and that through this blog I have been able to do it some justice. Goodbye for now, but I hope to see you later!