Muka Head - Day 4

21st November 2007, Wednesday

My group gather at 1st floor's meeting room at 8am to attend 'lecture'... Today, we were going to explore FOREST ecosystem!

After the briefing session given by Mr Kumar, we were divided into 3 groups. I was in the first group, together with Flory, Hazirah, Syariff and Zati; led by Mr Hazli (the teacher who scolded us the night before..).

Many people didn't like to follow this teacher as he's fierce and the site he brought was the farthest one, and hence the time to go back was quite late too.

So, again... we (3 of the small groups) climbed up the hill again.... but this time I felt better as the teacher leading us would stop suddenly to ask us names of plants and gave us some informations... so all of us could take a short rest, as he needed to rest too... although he's much more older than us, can't deny that he had stronger stamina than us! aiyoyo....

We stopped at the place further inside from the usual place we had stopped. There, the teacher in-charged of 2nd group, Mr Nazri taught us the way to use those instruments (for revision), and also introduced us few new ones which we had not seen before this ecosystem -- Abney Level, which is used to measure heights of tree.

We stayed here long to take turn using all instruments, then each group went on our way led by our teacher respectively.

As expected, Mr Hazli brought us to the fartherst site... on the way going, he kept on testing us on the names of plants again.. and finally, we could recognise the trees mentioned well because of times of repetitions..

For examples: Shorea sp. (Seraya, Meranti), Syzigium sp.(Kelat), Tristaniopsis merguensis, Eugeissona tristis (Bertam), Eurycoma longifolia (Tongkat Ali), Selaginella sp., Pandanus sp.

He's indeed fierce, but... he treated us as his children... he cared much for the young generations, for the future of our country...

can you see the grey part of the forest? The leaves of Shorea sp. are kinda greyish... one of the way to recognise these trees..

and yea, the grey part of the forest consists of Shorea sp... they are very valuable timbers!

some of the photos taken and combined..

On the way too.. he helped us took photo! lolz.. he's a cute teacher, he would wait us if we wanted to take photo...

he also taught us, if you want to take photo of something special like a special fungus, you should put something beside it so that people can make some comparison, and the photo would be more meaningful other than the object alone...

this photo was taken by our teacher... haha...

This is our Tropical Rain Forest~! nice huh!

What we did at our site was collecting leaves from quadrats (meter square) of 5x5, 10x10, 15x15, 20x20 and 25x25; the purpose of doing this was to count the species richness/species composition.

In addition, we had to draw a Forest Profile Diagram which would give us a simple illustration of the forest stand (able to differentiate strata A, B, C....) in the area of 20m x 5m within the quadrat of that site.

In order to draw the diagram, we needed to measure the Girth at Breast Height (gbh), height of tree to the first branch (by estimation using a pole with known length), height of tree from first branch to the top, the size of tree crown..

We didn't take the measurements from all the plants found in that area of course because there were so many !!! The ones taken into account were those exceeding 2.5meter in height. There were 32 of them! Our kind teacher helped us in the process of measuring too!

I was in charged of "sketching" the trees on my notes...

Flory was the busiest one... holding the pole for estimation of height of trees..

the fauna found..

By the time we finished our work, it was already about 2.30pm! All of us had not had our lunch =.=" so hungry and thirsty...

But actually the caring staff did prepare some snacks for us... just that most of us didn't eat (I ate while walking lolz..) and straight away walked back....

since I didn't bring enough water, I filled my bottle with water from upperstream which is just next to our site! hehee... it's not Sungai Tukun but another river..

and the water was so refreshing, cool and .... wah... just nice to drink! hohoho... don't worry, it's clean because it's upperstream here...

There were few routes to go back, we chose the one we didn't go before.... and it was quite tiring because this way required us to climb up long way of stairs... it's just a shortcut route to reach the usual place of the hill we stopped by.....

Oh... what a long way to go.... this was our group photo, taken by the staff..

the left man in this photo is Mr Hazli... =)

Syariff, Me, Zati, Hazirah, Flory..... and behind us the tree is Syzygium sp..

We were back to the research centre finally at about 4pm! wow... so hungry!!

The other 2 groups were already back few hours ago.. oh....

After having "lunch" at 4pm, I went for a walk at jetty and also took some photos...

The beach.... while low tide... and dead puffer fish found...

wonderful view in front of the research centre...

Then, I had to back to 2nd floor to continue our job.... to count the leaves we collected earlier..

For example, we placed the different leaves collected from quadrat 5mx5m and counted the number of species. Next, we compared and recognised the leaves from quadrat 10mx10m, if there was species of leaf found to be the same with the first quadrat, we discarded them... and the process repeated until we were done with all quadrats.

It's not an easy job, because some of the leaves look very similar to each other! oh... hard to recognise them!
This job took us about 2 hours.... then.. we had our dinner and took some rest...

counting leaves.... satu, dua, tiga....

We returned there then to do discussion etc... after short while of discussion, it turned out to be chit-chatting session with our dear cute Mr Hazli... haha... he's really nice.. he even asked us to find him at School of Biological Science when we have something to ask... he would be pleased to help us!

He even allowed us to pass up the Forest Profile Diagram before the exam.... ahaha.. that's why we planned to draw it on that night but failed to finish it lol...

As usual, our last night activity was to wander on the jetty for a while before going sleep =p

this was the Forest Profile Diagram done by Syariff after one week... haha..