Sitou Experimental Forest I

We get to play outside today! 

Okay, not play. But it feels great to be able to breath fresh air once again.

Breakfast was decent again, because cars can finally come through to the Forest. Before, trees had fallen over the road and power lines. Hence, our lack of diverse food and internet connection.

Today we were looking forward to actually getting outside again to view some plants. Our plan was to find smaller ground plants that have been damaged. These ones will be our specimens for the experiment, meaning we're going to dig them up to bring inside.



Before we had a chance to do that, our academics took priority. Dr. Lin from NTU gave us an extremely interesting yet complicated lecture about soil biodiversity. She even said herself that you need to have both a background knowledge in Soil Science (her concentration) and Microbiology to understand the topic.

Time for some dirty talk...

Soils are divided into six categories by the USDA, but also into twelve orders. Surprisingly, eleven out of the twelve can be found in Taiwan! The only one missing is only present is extremely cold climates. Soil is a micro habitat that serves as the environment for small animals, arthopods, neeeematodes, protists, bacteria, fungi, and even viruses. After learning this, the lecture became much more detailed. I only remember the concept that plants and animals are in a beneficial Nitrogen cycle together. We need each other.

For our tour of Sitou, we walked uphill for around half an hour to the Sky Walk. The walk wasn't a piece of cake, but also wasn't as tough as our first ascent up Yangmingshan. Chatting with friends about life and watching Ben attempt his Alpine exercises helped to pass the time. By the time we made it to the Sky Walk, I think some of us had exerted too much energy. We were too excited to finally be outdoors! Climbing gave me a slight headache and made Jiling tired as well. 



Some sights on the way there -

Castle on the hill

I genuinely thought these were real

Take a rest under this shelter

I loved the Sky Walk! What an experience to be able to have a different perspective of the forest. I didn't feel so small while walking close to the canopy, but I still felt a sense of awe. 

My efforts to teach the Hong Kong boys how to moon walk were done in vain.

I think Andria is always super happy. Either that or its her signature pose for pictures. Cute. 

After a casual proposal of our project, we felt confident enough to trek outside and search for plants. Our energy seemed to diminish because even as we walked further, no small damaged plants were visible. I felt like our group was on the verge of having an argument, but we stayed mature and tried to talk through the process. I'm really glad that I get to work with a group of such different people. Not just because we're from various countries, but also the age range of our group is 19 - 25 years old. We are in the same university going stage of our lives, yet somehow age sometimes makes a difference.

Returning back to our rooms, we asked the advice of Dr. Yu. He prefers to be called Simon, so I just called him Dr. Simon. He gave us the idea of measuring the diameters of the stems or surface area of leaves. This seemed good to us, so we settled on seeing if diameters of stems affected the amount of damage. Looking back, it seems obvious that it would.

Lucky us. The forest identifies it own plants for us!