The location I chose for my Home Phenology project was East Bradford Park, a small but nice place that is connected to my neighborhood. I’ve gone through this park many, many times in my life, from playing baseball and soccer games on the fields, to hanging out with friends on the playground, or running on it during quarantine out of sheer boredom. I have a lot of memories associated with this place, so I wanted to take my NR 001 knowledge and my time at Rock Point to see how they compare to my home location.
One of the reasons I enjoy walking/running around East Bradford Park is the views it gives of the entire surrounding area. As you can see from this picture, one can get a great view of the sunset walking on the trails here. It doesn’t show in this picture, but from at the top of this hill, you can see the entire neighborhood and see all of the forests that surround the park.
From this photo, we can see a little bit of the phenology and forest composition that takes place here. From my own experiences walking around here, the understory is much denser than anything I’ve seen at Rock Point, which was surprising to me since Rock Point is much bigger and vaster than the park. As you can see in the picture, there is an abundance of shrubbery and small, Viney trees in the understory, making it very dense to walk through for both humans and animals. As for the overstory, it is pretty thick as well. It is hard to see since there aren’t any leaves, but there are many large trees that dominate the overstory, making very large shadows over the understory beneath it. I would say this is pretty similar to Rock Point, where large Maples dominate the overstory while the understory does not consist of much besides small plants.