The Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC) manages nearly a million acres of land for conservation and recreational use. To do this properly, MDC needs to know how its forest management practices affect the ecosystem, which is exactly what the Missouri Ozark Forest Ecosystem Project (MOFEP) was designed to evaluate. At the ground level of MOFEP are the research crews—technicians who go into the forested study sites with various tools depending on the project they are working on. For the woody vegetation crew those tools include measuring tapes, calipers, data recorders, and much more to collect information on what species are present and how they are growing.
I’ve spent the last five months leading a crew of seven technicians, and together we measured the woody trees, shrubs, and vines, in the 648 MOFEP vegetation plots. The woody vegetation on MOFEP includes our common and commercially valuable oaks and hickories, along with unusual plants like gum bumelia and Alabama supplejack. We were out on the MOFEP sites every day, identifying every woody plant over a meter tall in our plots and measuring the diameter at breast height (DBH) of its trunk or stem. Whether it was a tiny grapevine, a massive 30-inch oak, or even a poison ivy vine, we would wrap our tapes or calipers around everything that was within the boundaries of our plots! Our measurements will be used to analyze where species are occurring and how each species is growing and responding to various forest management treatments.
Working outside every day in a variety of forest types, ranging from open mature forests to dense young forests, we encountered our share of challenges. We spent plenty of frosty mornings trying to keep our fingers warm while we hammered numbered aluminum tags into trees to mark their identity. Our toughest plots were in stands that were harvested in 2011, where the thick regrowth of young regenerating saplings hardly left space to stand. We sometimes measured well over a hundred young stems in our subplots (~436 square feet or an area about the size of a two-car garage)! Some plots contained large rock outcrops, so that half of the plot was ten or twenty feet up a rock face from the lower half. Greenbriers and other vines seem to love the soil around these outcrops, so we sometimes had to fight through dense, thorny veils while trying to clamber down the rocks. However, despite the challenges we had plenty of laughs and beautiful days too! When the temperatures warmed and the sky was clear, it was easy to remember why I wanted to do this job.
Every day I spend in the woods, I see and learn something new and exciting. It might be tiny—an unfamiliar species of wildflower or a mummified cricket killed by parasitic Cordyceps fungus. Other times it’s massive— an elk antler or even the elk herd itself! It’s such a joy to learn about the species around me and to help MDC and agencies across the country manage them effectively and sustainably. No matter how rough the weather or how thick the greenbrier, the excitement of seeing and learning new things is what keeps me in conservation work.
Written by: Henry Newell, Woody Vegetation Crew Leader
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