Wednesday December 12, 2018

This morning we have been reassigned mentors, we will now be working with Alex's team. Alex has been my professor at HU for the past 3 years, so I knew we were going to be hiking a lot and pushing our limits to do a very professional project. Alex and Jaden (another young lady) were working on assessing riperian corridors within the watershed. So we decided to combine the two. We decided to focus on the Java River, looking at both the water quality and the riperian corridors. The Java River is the main river that the some creeks drop into. Over the length of the river there are different succesional forest areas that are primary forest, selectively logged, secondary forest, and abandoned pastures. We will be looking at headwaters to the mouth. We are comparing each of these areas along the Java River to identify if anthropogenic (human causes factors) are affecting the watershed. We adventured out into the forest to start to start accessing points within the watershed. We started out slow but quickly caught on. We completed 3 assessments and It is pretty obvious that when the canopy is opened up through logging or slashing for pastures that there is more nutrients in the river. We hiked about 7 miles. We did do a little exploring and found the beautiful waterfall everyone was excited about. We had one of the native women with us for the day, she is from the Ngabe-bugle tribe in Panama that is only about 10 miles away. Before there was borders their people where in this territory. Her name was Victoria. She was very knowledgeable on eatable and medicinal plants. I was grateful to have her with us. She was fun, even though we could hardly understand one another. A very exhausting day all the way up to the end. I was happy to talk to my family at the end of the night. Dinner was good. To be continued....

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