And today's project

 A couple weeks back, one of my students (who is doing an internship) mentioned she'd been out doing prescribed burns around the lake, and I asked her if they did the research area we use.

She said they had and - "Oh no, is that a problem for your research?"

No, it isn't, actually it presents an opportunity; it would make it easier for my initial plan (setting up plots where I manually removed the invasive sericea to see if anything else germinated, and have other plots where I added a prairie mix. and still others that were control for each).

I decided to go out there today; my original plan was to try to figure out where exactly I should set up the plots, but then I had another idea. 

They burned it really well; almost all the grassland areas were blackened and a lot of the little invasive shrubby stuff was (I hope) killed off. 

Stuff is starting to resprout. Yarrow was coming back:

There was also grass resprouting but it's too early to know for sure what it is. 

Anyway, I got to thinking - the main area burned was the same area a student and I surveyed in 2018, after several years of no burns, and found it dominated by sericea lespedeza (an invasive bush-clover). That paper was never published - I got a reject/revise/resubmit, but it came a few weeks after my dad died and I just couldn't, so it's still sitting in my computer's memory - but I could resurrect those data and collect MORE this summer, AND I have GPS coordinates so I can find the transects again.

When I thought about that, I was excited - I could see how I could frame the paper, I could see that the native-plant society might be interested in publishing it. And I could do that while I waited for the sericea to resprout and I could be planning out my treatments while I collect those data. 

I walked around most of the west part of the site - several miles - and thought about it (and figured I'd get in my exercise by the walking for the day). And I decided then to go over and look at the other two areas on the eastern edge of the site and see if they got burned, too.

One was - it was just a small area where we had done a single transect.
The other one, hadn't, totally:

you can still see the remnants of the grass from last year in the background. The foreground is a large tree they felled and that burned. But that's okay? I can survey the areas again and see how they've changed in three years, two of them after being burned. 

And while I do that, like I said, I can keep thinking about other projects.
So it's a relief to have something in mind, something I can do. I'll ask around and see if there are any students looking for summer research hours - they can get credit. I won't get paid, but that's okay, that's kind of how research works here.

Then I grabbed lunch, and changed, and went back to campus and did my accumulated grading and got the exam for next week written. Tomorrow is more writing on the paper; Thursday I am taking off - I am supposed to get my stitches out (and hopefully hear that they got all of the basal cell carcinoma, if it was in fact that) and I am going to go drop off my quilts.

Friday will depend - if I get good work done tomorrow I might take half a day to prep the biostats for next week and then take the other half of the day off, if not, better spend it writing.