Another Tea Break

On one of my numerous trips from Hanoi to the Truong Son Mountains - and back, this young man prepared us a pot of hot tea in some roadside stop whose name I have forgotten. [NOTE: Love the red curtain in the background and the polka-dot glasses].  

Not Rattan

This picture is from Central Vietnam. Can't remember the exact circumstances, but I know that it was shot out of the front window of the truck that I was in, and that I was probably frantically pulling my camera out as we got closer to this truck thinking that it was full of rattan cane. But it's not. It's full of rubber hoses. Hundreds and hundreds of rubber hoses.

Where Are Those Transects II?

Another look at the location of those 960 rattan transects (see Field Books) using Google Earth and a video screengrab program. Different marker colors are used for different Nature Reserves. A total of 192 hectares of forest was sampled in this unprecedented resource survey.

Where Are Those Transects?

Have started pulling data out of the field books (see Field Books) from the Truong Son Mountain rattan survey (see Which Rattan Is That). One of the first operations was to compile a table of the coordinates of each transect, i.e. "geo-reference" them, and then to plot them on a map so that I could see how the transects were arranged throughout each Nature Reserve.  I was a little worried that perhaps the crews had done all the transects right off the road.

As is shown in the image above, a screen grab from a Google Earth plot of the transects recorded in the Song Thanh Nature Reserve, this was decidedly not the case.  Look at the group of transects in the upper left of the image. The field crews hiked way out into the forest before starting to count rattans. Each purple symbol represents a 2,000 m² sample.