We have finished the main fieldwork for the third Luquillo Forest Dynamics Plot (LFDP) census. This census lasted from July 2000 until 11 April 2002 and involved 5 groups of 8 volunteers, each working for 12 - 14 weeks, and 9 technicians working from 6 - 12 months, with essential help from the Luquillo Long term Ecological Research program (LTER) technicians John Bithorn and Maria Aponte.
I wish to express my great appreciation and gratitude to all of the technicians who were dedicated to this census. Timothy Bragg, Janeira Cartagena Aponte, Stefan Jirka, Michelle Hill, Lori Kruger Robert Marek, Nestor Perez Moliere, Sarah Sheltren and Nathan Swenson all did a marvelous job and worked incredibly hard. They helped train and supervised the volunteers, made sure the data was accurate and kept track of where we were as the census progressed. Nick Brokaw found a wonderful group of 40 volunteers (too numerous to mention by name) who made a terrific effort and tremendous contribution to this project. This census was especially arduous as the forest is still recovering from Hurricane Georges, and there are many piles of dead trees to climb, and huge numbers of new stems to record.
I would also like to thank all of the staff at El Verde Field Station who supported the volunteers during their stay in Puerto Rico. I am also grateful to the staff at the main ITES office for dealing with project administration and equipment purchases. In particular, Eva Cortes processed all of the stipend payments and ensured the volunteers were paid. I also thank John Thomlinson for his expertise and work in printing the tree maps for this census.
The LFDP census team offers sincere thanks to everyone that was kind enough to entertain us with talks at El Verde about their research. We learnt a great deal, and are very grateful for your time and effort to make our stay in Puerto Rico a more valuable ecological experience.
We are also very grateful to the Andrew Mellon Foundation, who provided the main funding for this census, and for additional financial support from Luquillo LTER program (National Science Foundation), and the University of Puerto Rico
I wish all of the LFDP third census participants the very best of luck and much success in the future. I am grateful for your efforts and very happy to have had the opportunity to meet and work with you all.
Jill Thompson, April 19th 2002.
Goals of LUQ Information Management (LUQ IM) for May 2003
During the next year, we have to get ready for the site review expected to happen on May or June 2003. A close revision of the proposal reviews on Information Management (IM, "IT" in our copies of the reviews) highlights four important aspects that the site reviewers will make certain we have accomplished by then:
Publish all data on the Web according to our Data Management Policy (See: http://luq.lternet.edu/datamng/imdocs/dmpolicy.htm)
The last task has been started already here at IM. For the first three items I need the cooperation of the investigators.
I will be available at our next site meeting at El Verde, from June 6th to the 8th (See online Calendar: http://luq.lternet.edu/cgi-bin/events_calendar/calendar.pl). This will be a great opportunity for me to start meeting with the investigators to revise the metadata and agree on the time for data update into the IM System and Web site. I will have my laptop with all the metadata and data files already on the Web so we can discuss about it and make plans for future appointments.
The revision for IM was favorable. I never had the opportunity to thank you for your fast response to get the data into the system since April 2000. My plans for the future are to further enhance the LUQ IM system, so it becomes a better support for your data management and analysis. For this I will need a constant communication with you, so I can be more aware of your needs for data management. Thanks.
EDA
Jody Potter
Research Technician
Dept of Natural Resources
University of New Hampshire
215 James Hall
Durham, NH 03824
(W) 603-862-2341
(C) 603-512-9981