Wild South

I took the time this morning to look at the website for Wild South. org. I met some of these guys on the trail this weekend on my overnight trip. They are surveying all the habitation along the trails and waterways of the Sipsey Wilderness. I copied a piece of their site addressing the surveying of the plant life on the Sipsey.

In a grant proposal submitted to NFF earlier this year, Wild South proposed to conduct a walking survey of all marked and maintained trails and year-round streams in the Sipsey Wilderness and record all NNIPS populations within a reasonably observable corridor. The grant was awarded, and since early May, Wild South staff members, interns and volunteers have been walking the trails and streams, collecting data with handheld GPS units, cameras, voice recorders and field survey forms. All data is collected and digitized according to the USFS’s Data Recording Protocols for Invasive Species Management and stored in the Terra module of the National Resource Information Systems (NRIS) database.

Trails, stream corridors and old roadbeds are some of the common entry points and conduits for the spread of NNIPS, so it is no surprise that our inventory so far has shown the most diverse and numerous NNIPS populations occurring along the major waterways and trails that follow historical roads. For example, Nepalese browntop (Microstegium vimineum) occurs in an almost unbroken strip along the banks of Sipsey Fork itself, as well as along Wilderness Trail 208, which follows the Old Northwest Road.

As noted in the article, they all had GPS's hanging around their necks. I asked them about the reception from the sats in the canyons and they thought the Garmin's did a great job. They thought they were getting down to about 20 feet. They also told me about a shortcut to the Big Tree through White Oak Hollow which I need to find on another trip.