page54
54
2. Soil Fundamentals
Clip plots can help you understand how much
biomass is present in a particular area. Before
you get started on this activity, consider the
following questions, based on your interests
and concerns, and jot down some notes.
Activity – Clip Plots
•
What should be the total area
of your sample?
•
How will you decide where to sample?
(See “Soil monitoring” on page 80,
for more guidance.)
•
Will plants be clipped and separated
by species, functional group (cool
season grass vs. annual forb), or other
characteristic(s)?
•
Will total biomass be collected,
or will you separate green/active
components from standing litter?
•
When will you be sampling and how
will this affect the amount
of biomass you will collect?
____________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
Supplies
•
A 1 square meter quadrat or a hula
hoop (that is, something to denote an
area of known size that you can lay on
the ground)
•
Clippers for clipping vegetation
•
Paper bags for collecting clipped
vegetation. Remember to label the
bags with enough information to
identify the sample, for example, initials
of the person doing the clipping,
the date, and information about the
location of the site.
•
Scale
Instruction
1.
Place your quadrat in a location where
you would like to know the quantity of
plant biomass per area.
2.
With a pair of clippers, remove all of
the vegetation within the quadrat to
ground level, and place it in a paper
bag.
3.
Clip enough quadrats to capture
the variation in biomass across the
landscape of interest. The more
variation there is, the more plots will
need to be clipped.
4.
Dry each bag of vegetation.
5.
Remove vegetation from each bag and
weigh it separately.