Sunday, August 16, 2009 at 10:41AM Random clips from the first attempt to run an inventory transect. Dr. Ban is laughing and scolding at the end because one of the rangers has counted and measured a plant that not only is not a rattan, it's not even a palm.
Sunday, August 16, 2009 at 9:28AM 
The transect the second day took two hours to finish. This is a shot of team 1 relaxing and waiting for team 2 to finish. I am pleased that the ranger in the foreground is looking at the rattan manual we put together for the workshop, and amused that his colleague to the right seems to be making a call on his cellphone. [NOTE: Cell phone coverage in Vietnam is amazingly complete. Only very rarely can you not get a signal].
Sunday, August 16, 2009 at 9:16AM 
The first transect we did took all day to complete. This is about four times as long as it should normally take, but the first day in the field always involves figuring out a bunch of things, e.g. the rattans, the compass, the GPS, recording the data. We stopped for lunch after 6 plots. Everyone was tired and hot, yet happy. [NOTE: We tallied ten species of rattan in 2000 square meters, and counted and measured almost 300 individuals. Leeches were scarce].
Sunday, August 9, 2009 at 4:24AM 
A shot from the second floor of the offices of the Song Thanh Nature Reserve in Quang Nam province, Vietnam. I will give a training workshop here next week on the identification and inventory of local rattans (see An Unusual Rattan and Weaving a Trivet) for representatives of six nature reserves in the Central Truong Son Mountains. The basic objective of the workshop is to help reserve staff start collecting the baseline data needed to develop management plans for the sustainable exploitation of wild rattan. [NOTE: Vietnam is the third largest producer of rattan in the world; a large percentage of this material comes from the Truong Son Mountains].