Acclimating to the Weather

I personally believe human interaction with the environment is an unavoidable and even necessary element of biodiversity. I've been surprised, I guess, at how vehemently some believe human interaction is always a deficit on the environment - and, in some sense, that may be true; in the same sense that lions in Africa detract from the wildebeest population, or ants in the Amazon detract from the leaf population. As long as humans have biological needs that must be satisfied by natural resources, we are going to effect the environments in which we live. The difference is learning to do that sustainably.

What does this have to do with weather? Well, the maps I'm making and information I'm providing in this blog is designed to get people - you, reader - out into the woods and fields and onto the trails. That's where you'll encounter this amazing and bio-diverse world in which we live first-hand. But trails need to be built and used sustainably as well - and that's where you, reader, also come in: wet, muddy trails are less fun to walk, and more susceptible to damage from foot, wheel, and hoof.

 So, I've put together a few resources for you to help you understand how the weather might impact your enjoyment of the field trip, and how your field trip might impact the places where you travel. 

This first one is simple, straightforward, and maybe already-known: weather-underground, or http://www.wunderground.com/ The beauty of this site is you can get very local, and if you go to Calendar view, you can see actual temperatures and precipitation amounts. After that, you'll need to do some experimenting; I found the trails in Tennessee were fairly dry the day after up to 1/4" of rain. The mountain bike trails in RCSP? They typically need 5 straight days of no precipitation to be dry (which is why you'll usually find them churned up pretty badly).

The second one comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and I'll start you here: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/climate-monitoring/ There are a number of links on the left side to play around with, and I encourage taking a look at many of them. Ones I found particularly interesting were: Temp, Precip, and Drought - subsets National Temperature Index and National Temperature and Precipitation Maps; Climate at a Glance; and Extremes - subset U.S. Climate Extremes Index (CEI). The CEI is interesting to look at different regions and how climate change is affecting them.

Finally, talk of temperatures and weather events is all well and good; but, on a practical side, those temperatures and weather patterns affect plant and animal life. So I suggest also checking out https://www.usanpn.org/data/visualizations. I haven't had a huge opportunity to really play with what this site can do, but essentially you can look into the phenology (seasonal life-cycles) of data gathered by the site, and see if and how plants are blooming earlier or later, and animals are migrating at abnormal times.

That's all for now! Get out there and enjoy some biodiversity!

ArcGIS Map of RCSP

Here's a similar map, created with ArcGIS (arcgis.com). This map maker seems to have a little finer tweaking you're able to do, or at least it was more obvious - as far as adding layers, making them transparent and/or making the layer visible from specific altitudes. (You'll notice as you scroll in and out, a topo layer pops up - which I thought was handy.) Until I decide which one I want to use, I'll be updating this one and the Google Maps version with all the Points of Interest I mentioned. So you'll get to pick which one you like best, too!

Google Map of RCSP

Here's a map I've created on Google Maps (https://support.google.com/mymaps/answer/3024396?hl=en); right now it shows mostly access points and parking lots off major roads. Keep coming back! I'll be hiking and uploading trails as I walk them. Google Maps was super-easy to use. The easiest way I found to upload trails is figure out how to export the .gpx from whatever app you use (Strava is my go-to for this) and you can Choose file or drag and drop. I'll also be photographing and showing plant species of interest, or other cool features along the trails so you can hike out and see them for yourself!

Basics of Ecology

A slide-show presentation prepared to talk about some basics of ecology as
it relates especially to biodiversity.

Enjoy!