Vegetation Monitoring will be used in the Riparian Area around Goose Creek as a way to collect and analyze data regarding survival, growth, and vigor of riparian plantings done by the Environmental Leadership Program. The protocol tracks multiple individual plants over time, including plants from past and present year(s). The methods implemented for monitoring individual plants are based on the original ELP team’s protocols from 2015. These methods are used to track how individual species are growing, what types of damages are most common near Goose Creek and how they affect plant growth, and which plants have been capable of surviving in this habitat. Some goals for collecting this data are the ability to estimate growth rates of plants and time until the “free-to-grow” status, determine species-specific survival rates of plantings along Goose Creek, evaluate vigor of planted stock by identifying problems like competition, browsing damages, and disease, and use all of the information gathered to provide maintenance and management recommendations for future ELP teams and the landowners.
There were four circular, eight meter radius plots established by the 2015 ELP team. Two of these plots are on the North side of Goose Creek and two plots are on the south side; none of these plots overlap with each other to prevent from data collecting error. The 2019 team recorded the data inside of these plots to track progress of the planting areas as a whole. Types of data recorded included height class, live crown height, and stem class. Any damage to the plant, as well as grass and brush competition, was also be tracked.
Results: The data we collected in 2019 shows continuous or steady growth from nearly every species (Figure 1). The major source of plant damage came from a combination of frost damage and drought wilting which would be due to the shifting weather from hot dry weather to wet and frigid (Figure 2). Overall plant mortality is low, however there is a heavy loss of the willows (Figure 3).
