Early season at RMBL is in full swing

Our RMBL team is gradually increasing in size, and sampling has started to ramp up! Last week, Annie, Manogya Chandar, and Berry arrived at RMBL and joined the field team. Manogya is an undergraduate student at Northeastern who is doing her co-op with us this summer and fall. After a relatively cold spring, the temperatures are now consistently in the high 60s, which means there are lots of plants to survey and pollinators to collect!

This year, we have two main projects: Kaysee’s spatial gradients project and our Qnest (quantitative nestedness) project. Between those two projects, we have 16 sites to sample every week. When we go to a site, we count flowers, collect data on sampling conditions, and destructively sample the insects that pollinate the flowers in the transects. So far, all of the sites are set up and sampled at least once, but we hope to sample each site at least 7 times over the course of the season.