Christmas 2015; The Weather Outside is Not Frightful; At Least So Far

Christmas in Long Lake is usually white or at least frozen. Even if there is no snow you expect ice, or an icy crust, especially in the forest. And, if all else fails, the mountain summits should be coated in white. But not this year. It's December 26th (2015) and there is no snow or ice to be seen -anywhere. Not in the shadows deep in the forest and not on distant summits. It looks like October before the first hard freeze.

The afternoon temperature passed 60 on Christmas eve and night time temperatures have dipped below 30 only a few times. There was a coating of snow on the summits in mid-November, (see my post on climbing Kempshall Mountain in early Nov.) but even that has completely disappeared.

It was under these unusual conditions that Elle and I set off on a walk to the historic Santanoni Preserve great camp complex. The ten mile round trip feeling like a walk on cool fall day.

Newcomb Lake with just a hint of ice. December 26th, 2015.

It's tempting to point a finger at climate change as the cause of this unusual weather but climate and weather operate on different scales; different time scales and different geographic scales. A point seemingly lost on those who consider the area occupied by the United States to be the entire world.

For example, when U.S. Senator Jimmy Inhofe brought a snowball into the Senate chamber (February, 2015) to make the point that it was cold outside so therefore climate change must be a hoax, he personally damaged our national standing around the globe (except apparently in Oklahoma). People around the world could only laugh and shake their heads at how silly the Americans have become. But they also had to wonder; is someone paying him to be stupid? Or, is he really unable to understand the distinction between weather and climate?

So now, looking at the reverse side of the coin, let's be clear, a single warm month in one small region does not mean much. If the current Octoberish weather becomes the norm for December then climate change might be the cause. And, as the argument that I commonly hear goes, so what if it does? The climate has always changed. We just have to adapt.

Ok, but it's still a question of scale. Based on our current knowledge of climate changes in the past, it's the pace of change that is the problem. An five degree increase in the average global temperature over a period of a thousand years would represent an extremely rapid rate of change. But even so, we would expect that thousand years to provide time for natural systems to adapt. It would be a disruptive event but ecosystems could adapt rather than collapse. That same change over a time span measured in decades it might very well be an event unprecedented in the history of the earth. We can only guess at what that scenario might bring but it is unlikely to be a good thing for a human population of eight to ten billion people. And it seems pretty foolish to give it a try to see what happens.

Still, gene preservation aside, we humans are selfish creatures and if the world is going to have a melt down those of us who live in the north can take advantage of it for a while. So let's get back to the hiking.

Elle, on the bridge that crosses Sucker Brook on the northeast corner of Newcomb Lake. This spot is a half mile past the camp complex. The trail passes through a beautiful forest with notable old cedars present.

By Adirondack standards, for December, this is a sunny day.

The bathhouse and beach. This spot is quarter mile from the main lodge site. It doesn't look like much at this time of year but there is a nice sand beach and this is a great spot for a swim on a hot day.

Ripples are visible in the sandy bottom of the lake. That's Moose Mountain near Moose Pond visible in the distance.

A lovely spot along the trail around Newcomb Lake. The trail around the lake is rugged and strikingly beautiful.

The Pine Orchard: You Know When You Are In It

The Pine Orchard is a well known stand of old growth White Pine and Hemlock near Wells (NY). If you read this blog you know that I'm always on the look out for the big old trees, so a visit to the Orchard was long overdue. I'd read that the Pine Orchard contains trees up to seven feet in diameter but, I have to admit, I was skeptical. I wondered if trees, like fish, get bigger with each telling of the tale. I was prepared to be underwhelmed by the Pine Orchard. Happily, I was wrong. The Pine Orchard is impressive and these may very well be the largest and oldest trees in the southern Adirondacks.

But how big --exactly-- are the pines in the Pine Orchard? I measured a few trees and the largest one I found has a diameter of 51 inches; just over four feet. I took this measurement by stretching a cord around the tree four and a half feet above the ground. The distance on the cord measured 161 inches and dividing that by 3.14 yields the diameter: 51 inches. That's not the six to seven feet that some have reported but I might not have measured the very largest trees. And while measuring the diameter at four and half feet is standard practice in forestry circles, others might have done it differently.

I'm interested in the history of the Adirondack forests and the large old trees have stories to tell. So I look for them when I hike. Over the past several years whenever I've spotted a large tree I've noted the location and estimated the size. Now that I've refined my measurement technique I see that my past estimates may have tended towards the high side (No, Dad, this does not apply to fish I've caught in the past). I carry an old ski pole as a walking stick and I've used the pole as a gauge for estimating tree diameters. I now see that this technique is insufficiently precise. In the Adirondacks, trees with diameters of 36-40 inches are found in many places. Trees of that size will typically be more than 125 years old and a stand containing many trees of that size may have been passed over, or selectively logged, in the first wave of industrial logging. That first wave took place after 1850 and continued into the early part of the 20th century. You can also find trees with diameters larger than 40 inches scattered about in the Adirondacks, but these are much less common. These trees were almost certainly standing before 1850. The really big and old trees, with diameters of 44 inches or larger, are rare. The Pine Orchard contains a number of trees in the 44-48 inch range and estimates that I've seen place the age of the stand at over 200 years. (Note: the correlation between tree size and age varies with species and growing conditions).

Image One: A large White Pine near the point where you first reach the Pine Orchard Stand. The strand of yellow yarn is one foot in length.

The Pine Orchard: Old Growth Forest

The Pine Orchard is old growth. At 200 years without external disturbance the forest has reached the climax stage in terms of ecological succession. For this location, and given whatever circumstances protected it originally, that means mature White Pine with some Hemlock and a few old hardwoods mixed in. Stands of old growth pine are often compared to a cathedral and that description applies to the Pine Orchard. The forest floor is blanketed with a deep layer of pine needles that absorbs sound and this is an airy, quiet, place. I was there on a very warm day and it was pleasantly cool under the cover of the large trees.

Image Two: The cathedral in the pines. The forest floor is covered with a two century accumulation of pine needles. Smaller trees are mixed in but the canopy is dominated by the large White Pines.

The Trail and the Hike The route I followed leaves the Pumpkin Hollow road at the Murphy Lake trailhead. As with the the trail to Wilcox Lake this route is marked and maintained as a snowmobile trail. The 1994 ADK guide to Trails of the Southern Region described this trail as indistinct and hard to follow. That Guide advised that this route should be attempted only by hikers skilled with map and compass and it went so far as to say that the trail was not recommended for parties of fewer than three people.

Image Three: From Google Earth. The entire route covering 5.9 miles each way.

That guide was written over 20 years ago and much has changed. I don't know whether the warning was justified when the book was written, but it is not true today. The route generally follows old woods roads and it for pleasant walking. There are a couple places where arrows (signs) point the way. Not because the trail is indistinct but because multiple old woods roads intersect and it could be difficult to pick the correct route. Interestingly, the warning from the ADK guide was carried over to a much newer map. My favorite trail maps these days are the "Trails Illustrated" Topographic Maps produced by the National Geographic Society. The Northville/Raquette Lake map covers the southeastern Adirondacks and that map restates the warning about parties of "at least three persons" word-for-word.

There is also a meaningful discrepancy in the length of this route as stated on signs and as printed in various guides. As measured using GPS my hike covered a total of 11.8 miles. This included a bit of wandering around so the sign board at the road which states the distance to the Pine Orchard as 5.6 Miles is reasonably accurate. The 1994 ADK Guide lists the distance at 6.6 miles one way. And a third distance, derived by adding up distances seen on signs along the way, yields a total of 4.2 miles. Applied to the round trip, the difference between the shortest and longest mileage is over four miles. That's a serious lack of accuracy.

There are two apparent sources for the uncertainty. The first is that there is no distinct point or boundary to mark your arrival at the Pine Orchard. The lack of a clear "here it is" location accounts for a tenth mile or two of the discrepancy. This is a question of precision. Lacking a distinct end-point it's difficult to measure the distance to the tenth of a mile precision typically used on trail signs. The second consideration is that over the past 30-40 years the trail has been re-routed, probably more than once. The 1994 ADK Guide alludes to this noting that the trailhead had been moved to avoid a crossing of private land. This is also evident in an old sign seen at the junction with the Flatters trail. The sign says that it is 2.6 miles to the "Willis Lake Road" but the trail doesn't go to the Willis Lake Road. That was probably the original starting point. If the sign stated the distance as "a few miles" it would be more accurate but not very precise. As it sits, it is neither.   

Image Four: Stanton Miles: When our children were young we would take them hiking and the first thing they wanted to know was; "how far is it?" To which I would respond "a couple of miles." It took only a few outings for them to realize that my "couple of miles" could be anything from two to five miles. That answer is accurate but not very precise and my scale became known in the family as "Stanton Miles." If you use Stanton Miles the difference between what appears on the sign and the actual distance of four miles is accounted for.

Uncertainty, Accuracy and Precision

Measuring the diameter of a tree is pretty easy. And collecting measurements from many trees is a straightforward process:

• Measure the tree
• Record the location
• Record the species
• Note unusual or complicating factors
• Repeat

That sounds easy enough, and it is easy. Which is why I am continually surprised by all the different ways that uncertainty creeps into the data. Part of it comes from doing this work in the Adirondack Biting Insect Preserve. During the warm months you encounter many many small complications and distractions and for the rest of the year your fingers will be numb making it difficult to write out notes. But sometimes I run into more specific issues:

• Diameter: What about double-trunk trees? Or trees in difficult locations? What if there is a branch or some other oddity at the 4.5 foot height where I want to measure?
• Location: Assuming that the accuracy level of your GPS device is good enough, and assuming that you have a good signal from several satellites, and assuming that you correctly note which location goes with which tree, it nothing more than the push of a button.
• Species: I'm familiar with most tree species seen in the Adirondacks, especially the species that get to be big. Still, when I have gone back and looked at the same trees a second time I've found that I get some of the them wrong.
• Notes: Some days I do a good job of recording the unusual or complicating factors and some days not so good. And this information often turns out to be important when trying to draw conclusions from a body of data.

On one point I have no doubt. All non-trival data contains errors and considerations of precision and accuracy are relative to the intended use. These are the sources of uncertainty.

A Couple of Miles: I was just being accurate

As often happens, the use of a tool under less than ideal conditions leads to a deeper understanding how the tool works. Using GPS to record locations and to record the tracks I've follow has given me a deeper understanding of how the system works. I'm going to return to this topic in the future but a few key points go right along with the theme of this post. First, take a look at image five. The lines show a short section of the track captured by my GPS receiver on the hike to the Pine Orchard and back. The line on the left was from the inbound leg of the trip and the line on the right is from the return trip. I walked the same path both ways so it's odd that the the lines are so far apart. To get to the bottom of this you need to know something about how I hike.

I took much longer to complete the trip to the Pine Orchard then I did on the return and this is typical for me. And this was not because of the terrain. The route crosses a couple of small ridges but there is very little difference between the elevation at the turn around point. It's counter intuitive, but I typically travel at a slower pace on the way in because I'm fresher. On the way in I stop to record measurements, I take photos and I generally take more time to enjoy the forest the scenery. On a hike of this distance by the time I'm half way back to the car I'm starting to get tired. And this is the counter-intuitive part, I tend to walk faster and I move along without stopping. On this particular day, it was hot and by the time I reached the area shown in image five I'd been hiking for over five hours. It was also into the early afternoon and I was I not hiking alone. I was traveling with dozens of new (and now really annoying) friends that I'd made along the way. Deer flies, midges, mosquitoes and a few too-stupid-to-just-give-up-and-die black flies. The bug spray that had been mostly effective earlier in the day was no longer working. 

Image Five: GPS Accuracy 
The lines in the image show a short segment of the track captured by my GPS receiver on the hike to the Pine Orchard and back. The line on the left was from the inbound leg of the trip and the line on the right is from the return trip. I was walking on the same path for both legs of the journey, so you might expect the lines to be very close to each other. (Map Image from Google Earth)

A GPS track like the one shown in the image is recorded as a series of points. Every second or so (this will vary based on the device) the GPS receiver calculates your location and stores the coordinate pair representing that location.  When you stop the receiver gets extra time to correct for errors so stopping periodically improves the accuracy of the track overall. This is especially true when walking through a dense forest where the strength of the signals is reduced by foliage. In image five I added a note to a place where it looks like I took a short side trip off the trail. But I know that that never happened. What did happen is that the GPS recorded a couple of points with much lower accuracy and those points became part of my route. If I was planning to use this track as data I would need a method to clean up these kinds of errors. 

There are many factors that limit the best case accuracy of GPS. A GPS receiver captures signals sent by satellites orbiting the earth and when the receiver has signals from at least three of these satellites it can calculate your location. The U.S. GPS system uses a constellation of 32 satellites positioned so that there should always be at least three satellites above the horizon and "visible" to a GPS receiver located anywhere on the earth. Under good conditions a typical consumer GPS receiver can fix your location to within about 10 yards -30 feet- using signals from three satellites (four are required to also calculate your elevation). At that accuracy level you use the coordinates calculated by the receiver and place a point on a map. Then you draw a circle with a diameter of 30 feet around the point. Your actual location lies somewhere in that circle. 

Depending on what you are trying to do that may or may not be accurate enough and it's usually possible to get much more accurate data. For instance, it's common for there to be more than the minimum of three satellites available to your receiver. Modern GPS receivers including the ones found in most smart phones, use the "extra" satellites to average out some of the errors that otherwise limit GPS accuracy. For example, when I save a waypoint (the coordinates for a single location) using my Garmin GPS it tells me how accurate the fix will be based on the set of satellites available to it. The use of additional satellites and averaging commonly improves accuracy into the ten to twenty foot range. On the other hand, dense foliage, cliffs, mountains and other obstructions reduce accuracy or prevent the receiver from getting any fix at all.

The point is that data taken from measurements is always uncertain to some degree and the level of uncertainty varies based on the specifics of how you gather the data and your intended use. You have to ensure that your data is accurate enough for the intended use and you have to avoid mis-representation by overstating the level of precision. When I use a cord to measure the circumference of a tree, if my measurement is accurate to within one inch then I can state the diameter in inches. Dividing the circumference by Pi to get the diameter will almost always yield an answer with a remainder, something like 45.3. But the .3 must be thrown away. The accuracy level of my measurement does not support that level of precision. If a trail sign states a distance as 2.6 miles, then assuming typical rounding to the nearest tenth we can say that it's accurate if the actual distance is between 2.55 and 2.65 miles. Assuming, of course, that it's the correct sign for the trail you are on. My GPS gives me coordinates with 6 decimal places of precision. That's precise enough to separate locations that are just inches apart. But the device is not nearly that accurate and the last digit (and maybe the last two) should be discarded. The extra precision is meaningless at best and misleading at worst. Whenever we take measurements there is uncertainty and the level of precision we use should not overstate the accuracy of our technique. 

You see kids, when I said it was a "couple miles" I was giving you the most accurate answer that I could. 

Wilcox Lake via Pumpkin Hollow

By the late 19th century the area north of Great Sacandaga Lake was dotted with hamlets and farms. Most of those homesteads are now gone -reclaimed by the forest-- but some of the forest roads that once connected them remain in use as trails. The Pumpkin Hollow trail to Wilcox Lake follows one of those routes.

Image One: From the Stony Creek USGS Historical Topographic map. 1:62500, 1910 Edition. The route to Wilcox Lake follows an old woods road from Willis Lake (on the left) to Wilcox Lake (top right).  

The 1994 ADK Guide to Trails of the Southern Region makes four observations about the Pumpkin Hollow trail to Wilcox lake:

1. The trail passes through an attractive and maturing second growth forest.
2. With the exception of eroded areas around Wilcox Lake the trail is in excellent condition.
3. Parking at the end of the Pumpkin Hollow road is iffy. Good parking can be found at the Murphy Lake trail head but that option adds 1.5 miles (each way) to the route.
4. There might not be a bridge over the Wilcox Lake outlet and crossing the stream in times of high water can be difficult.

As of July 2015 three of those four considerations remain true. This is a wonderful hiking route through an exceptionally attractive forest. The area around Wilcox lake does show scars from past motor vehicle access but the damage is fading. The choice on where to park remains the same but the bridge is not a problem. There is a good bridge over the outlet stream.

As part of the Forest Preserve the area around Wilcox Lake is classified as Wild Forest; a designation that allows for uses that are prohibited in wilderness areas and the Pumpkin Hollow trail is maintained (and marked) as a snowmobile trail. The ADK Guide notes that in past times vehicles reaching Wilcox lake from the Bakertown area caused extensive erosion on the hillside leading down to the lake. But I saw no sign of recent vehicle use and the eroded areas are recovering.

Image Two: Large Sugar Maple along the trail

The Trail and the Forest

The Pumpkin Hollow trail passes through an impressive, maturing, second-growth forest. With so many large trees present it appears that this area somehow escaped logging and fire reaching back into the 19th century. The forest contains a mix of species including Sugar Maple, Ash, White Pine, Hemlock, Birch and Beech.

Image Three: It's difficult to capture the 'feel' of a forest in an image (I'll have to work on this) but this is a rapidly maturing northern hardwood forest. For scale, the large tree on the right has a diameter of around 30 inches. This area contains trees that must be more than 150 years old. 

I found this forest to be particularly appealing because it looks like what I expect an undisturbed northern hardwood forest to look like. The presence of large trees of multiple species creates a dense canopy that limits the amount of light reaching the forest floor and that results in a relatively open forest understory. You can also see an open understory where stands of large Hemlock and White Pine are present but a mature hardwood forest has a different feel. When a large hardwood comes down it creates a big opening in the canopy and a variety of tree and shrubs species rush to take advantage of that. Over time these openings appear in a random pattern and you end up with a patchwork of open forest and dense little thickets. That is what I expect a climax stage northern hardwood forest to look like. Some areas along this trail have that appearance.

Particularly interesting is the presence of American Beech trees that have survived the initial kill-off caused by Beech Bark Disease (BBD). One Beech, with a diameter over 30 inches, may be the largest standing Beech I've seen since I started looking for them. Image Four shows this tree and while it looks pretty healthy my photo captured the tree's "good side". The back side of the tree shows extensive signs of BBD. One unfortunate aspect of BBD is that relatively healthy looking trees oftentimes fall victim to Beech Snap (Image Five). This happens because the disease weakens the trunk of the tree. So large trees with heavy canopies become vulnerable to breaking off in heavy weather. Beech snap is characterized by standing Beech trunks broken off cleanly 8 to 20 feet above the ground. Once you know what to look for you'll start to see these "snapped" Beech trees where ever mature Beeches were formerly present.

The large tree pictured in Image Four got me thinking about an intriguing possibility. This is the second large Beech I've seen that bears the unmistakable scar of a lightening strike. Could it be that a lightening strike kills the fungus (or the insects that spread it) giving the tree a better chance of fighting off BBD? If it takes being hit by lightening to survive then clearly it is not easy to be a Beech tree.

Image Four: A Large American Beech

Image Five: Beech Snap. Large Beech trees that appear to be holding their own against BBD can fall victim to Beech Snap. This occurs when a weakened tree is unable to support the weight of  its' canopy and the trunk snaps.

The Pumpkin Hollow trail also passes through an area where very large and old White Pines are seen. A number of trees with diameters greater than 36 inches are present and a few are approaching 48 inches. Trees of that size must be more than 150 years old and could be more than 200 years old. This got me thinking about the well-known Pine Orchard located just five miles north of the Pumpkin Hollow Pine stand. I've not yet visited the Pine Orchard but it would be interesting to compare measurements of trees from both areas. If the measurements show that the two sets of trees got going at about the same time it might shed some light on the history of this forest.

Wilcox Lake

Despite concerns about vehicle access and erosion Wilcox Lake is an attractive and worthwhile destination. As mentioned, eroded areas near the lake are starting to heal and the shoreline is in good shape. According to current maps there are two lean-tos at Wilcox Lake though that could change. The one that I visited is in bad shape and could topple over at any time. 

Image Six: Wilcox Lake

Image Seven: The eastern lean-to at Wilcox lake. It looks like the bottom tier of logs from this lean-to rotted out and that layer of logs was somehow removed. The current structure is not connected to the floor and the walls are leaning precariously. It looks like it could fall down at any moment.

Parking

Image Eight: You can park at the Murphy Lake Trail head on Pumpkin Hollow Road (far left) or you can drive past Willis lake and try to make your way to the small parking area found where the red and blue lines meet on the map.

You have a choice to make when deciding where to park. There are signs and good parking at the Murphy Lake trail head on Pumpkin Hollow Road. As seen on the map (Image eight) this parking area is at the far left where the red line begins. If you start hiking at that point you'll walk the road past Willis Lake and up a couple of hills. After a mile and a quarter you'll come to a couple of camps on the left. Just past the second camp the road narrows and gets much rougher. From there it's another 1/4 mile to a small parking area and the DEC barrier at the start of the trail part of the Wilcox Lake trail (roughly 5.5 miles to Wilcox Lake from there).

Or, you can drive that same route. From Willis Lake to the camps the road is in pretty good shape but there's no clearly safe place to park along that section. Once you pass the camps the road is not at all car friendly and the last hundred yards or so before the parking area is extremely rough. I inched my Subaru Forester toward the parking area and found a decent place to pull off just at the point where I couldn't go any further. Which was good because backing out was going to be very difficult.

Google Earth and KML - Part Two (GETECH)

In the previous post I introduced the topic of working with geographic data in the KML format. As mentioned there, KML is the native data format used by Google Earth (GE) and it is widely supported by both GPS devices and software. I won't attempt to cover all the gory details of working with and editing KML in this series of posts (resource links at the end), but there a few practical things I've learned about working with GPS data in the KML format that I want to share.

As a basis for this discussion I'm looking at two GPS tracks I recorded on a short Kayak trip on the Kayaderosseras Creek near Saratoga Springs. One was recorded using my trusty Garmin GPS and the other was recorded using the GPS receiver in my camera; a Canon Sx260. I'll discuss and compare the accuracy of the two tracks and touch on some other issues you might encounter while using GPS to collect geo-referenced data for use in your projects.

The first issue is evident in the screen shot below (Image 1). The red line represents the track captured by the GPS receiver in the camera. The purple line shows the route recorded by the Garmin. The obvious difference is that the purple line extends beyond the point where the red line stops. That's because the red line stops at the place where I put the kayak into the creek and later took it out (at the Spa State Park Canoe Launch Site on Driscoll Road). I paddled upstream for a mile or so and then floated back down. I had both GPS units turned on and both units recorded the path. The purple line continues because when I got back to the launch point I forgot to turn off the Garmin GPS. So it recorded a track for the short carry from the creek up to the parking area and for my drive home. That data is not useful so the first thing I want to do is remove it.

Image 1: Screen capture from Google Earth. The two lines (red and purple) are GPS tracks recorded simultaneously on Kayak trip on the Kayaderosseras Creek near Saratoga Springs (NY)

I could do that by editing the track directly in Google Earth. That would be easy but it would be extremely tedious. There are several mouse clicks required to delete a point and there are a lot of points to get rid of to clean up this problem. You can see this in image two. For this screen capture I turned off the display of the track recorded by the camera (the red line) and selected the purple track for editing This makes visible the points recorded by the GPS. Each recorded point is represented by a red dot in the image and as you can see, there are a lot of points in just this short section of the route from the creek to my house. To remove this part of the track by editing it in GE you'd click on each points, select Delete, confirm the deletion and repeat. Lots of repeats.

Image 2: Screen capture from Google Earth. With the display of the track recorded by the camera (the red line) off, the track represented by the purple line was selected for editing. This allows us to see the individual points recorded by the GPS receiver. 

A better alternative is to open the KML file containing the track in a text editor and remove the unwanted points from the file. Once you have the hang of it you can edit the data in the file very quickly. There are few steps involved in this process which goes something like this:

1. Export the track to a file. In Google Earth right click on the item in the Places pane, select Save Place As. Be sure to select KML from the format drop down so the file is saved in the KML format.
2. Open the file in a text editor or an XML editor (I use Notepad++; a free and open source editor that is popular with programmers). You may need to configure your editor to recognize that the KML file is an XML file. That should allow the editor display the contents with nice formatting.
3. In this case, removing the points I don't want comes down to removing all the points where the latitude is greater than the latitude of the put-in point. I'm in the northern hemisphere --so the latitude coordinates increase as you go north-- and all the points I want to keep are south of the put-in. Image three shows the map zoomed in on that location with the properties dialog for the point displayed. The properties dialog shows the latitude and longitude of the marker (and the location). This is how I got the latitude I will use as the basis for my edits; any point with a latitude greater than 43.034293 can be removed from the file. A potential complication is that that the coordinates in the KML file are stored using the decimal degree format. That's as you see it in the dialog seen in image three, but that representation is not the default for coordinates in Google Earth. The default is to represent coordinates in the Degree/Minute/Second format; like this: 43°02'03.4548" You can change the representation used by Google Earth using the Options dialog on the Tools menu.

Image 3: Screen capture from Google Earth. Viewing the properties of a marker added at the location of the start/end point of the trip. The properties dialog shows the coordinates of that point.

Once you have a KML file containing your track, and you have a way to identify the point(s) to remove (in this case, latitude > 43.034293) you can remove the unwanted points from the file. To do this you do need to know a little bit about the XML data format and how to edit data stored in XML, but there are many introductions to XML available on-line and I've included references at the end of this post. Also, if you've done any work with HTML this will all look familiar. XML data elements are placed inside of tag pairs and you must delete the entire tag pair or you wil break the formatting of the file (and GE will complain when you try to reload it). You'll also need to recognize how the coordinates are represented. An example from my file looks like this:

<gx:coord>-73.79277999999999 43.034036 102.52</gx:coord>

The coordinate of the location is represented by three values with a space placed between each value (it might be hard to see the space; -73.79277999999999<space>43.034036<space>102.52). The values are:

-73.79277999999999	longitude	a "west" longitude represented as a negative number
43.034336	latitude	a "north" latitude represented as a positive number
102.52	elevation	meters above sea level

As discussed in the previous section, I want to delete any point where the latitude is greater than 43.034293, so this point can be removed from the file. The points are stored in the file in order, so once you find the place break between what you want and what you want to remove you can select all the bad rows and remove them. If editing data in this way is familiar to you then this should get you started. If this is entirely new then you may need more help. Look at the references or ask a friend who knows about this stuff.

With unwanted data removed from your file there is one final step; opening the file in Google Earth so you can see the results of your work. In Google Earth select "Open" from the File menu and find your edited file on disk. If you get warnings about errors check the file over for mis-matched tag pairs. That's it, you can save the file in your Places folder so that Google Earth reopens it automatically or you can reopen the file when you need it in the future.

This post is already rather long so I'm going to cover the other topics I raised at the start in a separate "part two" posting.

Using Google Earth for Geographic Exploration (GETECH)

Readers of this blog know that I use Google Earth (GE) to plan outings and to manage data that I collect using various GPS devices. I use Google Earth as a sort of entry-level Geographic Information System (GIS) and in the following series of posts I plan to share what I've learned about using Google Earth as part of a citizen/community science data management system. I'll probably move these posts out to a separate blog in the future but to get it started I'm putting them here. If you aren't interested in these more technically oriented posts you can skip them. I''ll stick (GETECH) on the title to make them easy to recognize.

On most of my outings I collect geo-referenced data using one or more GPS devices. I have a Garmin hand-held GPS, GPS in my phone and even a camera with GPS built-in. I collect "tracks", the GPS receiver stores a point every few seconds allowing you to trace your route, and I also save WayPoints. These are specific locations of interest and the GPS saves the coordinates along with a name you enter. The Garmin GPS can grab a bunch of coordinate pairs in quick succession and average them to improve the accuracy of the fix. This is useful if you want to get the most accurate location that your device can record, usually around ten feet. I'll do a future post on GPS accuracy to explain this limitation.

After a trip I upload the data from my GPS devices into GE. This allows me to see the tracks (my route) and waypoints in the geographic context provided by GE. If the data was collected for a specific use I move it into whatever storage system I'm using for that project (more on this in a future post). My Garmin GPS is directly supported by GE so I simply plug the GPS unit into a USB port and use the GPS option on the Tools Menu. There are options to allow you select what you want to import. By default GPS data is added into a sub-folder of the "Temporary Places" folder in your GE Places. I typically tweak things a bit and move the imported data into the "MyPlaces" folder. This allows me to save each GPS data set for ready access in GE. You could also right click on your newly uploaded dataset and save it to your computer using the Save Place As option.

It's even easier to grab the GPS data using the phone. I have several GPS related apps on my Android phone (a Google Nexus 5) but I most often use GPS Essentials. As with the dedicated Garmin, GPS Essentials allows me to record tracks and save waypoints (it has other capabilities that I'll discuss in future posts). To get the data into GE I use the Export feature of GPS Essentials and save the data directly to Google Drive (Internet-based storage). It takes a few minutes but once the data shows up in Google Drive I save it to my local computer as a KML file. KML is the native file format of Google Earth and most software that uses geographically referenced data can use data in the KML format.

This has been my basic working process for several years but I've recently become concerned that it was breaking down. The data I collect is best categorized as "ecological inventory". I note where species are found, when I saw them and I record additional information about the circumstances. The "where" and "when" are essential to the data having value and I was not managing this information in a consistent way. It's there --embedded in the KML files-- but I didn't have an easy way to find everything related to a location; or everything for a specific time span. Some of data was stored in raw files and some was in databases that I've created. To maximize the value the data needs to be consolidated and I need a more robust process for recording and managing the metadata. Also, with over 200 top-level sub-folders in my MyPlaces folder, Google Earth was running noticeably slower.

Screen capture of Google Earth after I cleaned up and organized my MyPlaces data. The lines are tracks captured using GPS and the markers are points of interest.

So I looked into how GE actually manages this data and found that all of the data you see in GE in the "MyPlaces" folder is actually stored as a single file on your computer named myplaces.kml. The location of this file varies based on the operating system of your computer and the version of GE you are using. On my computer, running Windows 7 and using Google Earth Pro, the file is saved to:
C:\Users\<your-windows-name>\AppData\LocalLow\Google\GoogleEarth

Seeing the MyPlaces.kml file made it clear why GE was straining a bit. The MyPlaces.kml file on my computer was just under 50 megabytes in size and using a text editor to open it I found that it contained over 1.1 million lines. For context, if we assume that a page of text averages around 60 lines, the MyPlaces file on my computer contained over 18,000 pages. That's a bit much.

I had let the situation get out of hand and now it was going to require a lot of work to straighten it out. One approach would be use the GE user interface. In GE you can save each folder or item in the MyPlaces folder to a separate file on your computer.  You can then delete that item from MyPlaces and open the file when you want to use that data. If the item you save is a folder GE creates a single archive file with the (.KMZ extension) containing the entire contents of the folder. This approach would work but it was going to be a tedious process to say the least.

A second alternative is to edit a copy of the MyPlaces.kml file using a text editor (note that I said "edit a copy" - don't edit the file used by GE). You can use any text editor to open a KML file. Unfortunately, given the size of the file on my computer this also was going to be a slow and error prone process. Using NotePad++ --an editor design for working with lots of text-- opening and navigating the file was extremely sluggish (recall the 1.1 millions lines). I could have copied out sections and worked on pieces of the file but the data is structured (it's an XML file if you are familiar with that sort of thing) and there are references among different sections in the file. It would be very easy to mess this up.

The solution I chose was to write a script to run through the file (a copy of course) and save each folder, document and placemark to a new, separate, KML file. I could then remove (making a copy) the MyPlaces.kml file used by GE (make sure that GE is not running if you do this). The next time GE is run it creates a new and empty MyPlaces.kml file and you are back to a "clean" install of GE. The separate KML files created by the script can then be opened using GE when I need them.

I'm making this script available for anyone who wants to run it and you can access here:
https://gist.github.com/kentstanton/3441cc368d3c52621b19

Please note that you must have PowerShell 5.0 installed on your computer to run the script and you need to know how to run PowerShell scripts. If you are familiar with PowerShell programming you can alter the script as needed. And it would not be too difficult to port the code to a different language if you do not have a Windows computer to run it on. The script requires Windows PowerShell 5.0; the very latest version (as of this writing). I'm working on a larger project that will incorporate this functionality and remove this requirement but I wanted to go ahead and make this available now because it might be useful to some people as is.

A Busy Summer of Hikes and Water Trips - Kayaderosseras Creek and Cedar River Flow

One of the worst things you can do with a blog is to allow months to go by without posting anything new. That, unfortunately, is exactly what I've done. It's not that I've lost interest in the projects described in earlier posts. It's that summers are short in this neck of the woods and I've been getting out a lot. Many of those outings have been related to the project (at least that's what I tell myself) but some have been just for fun. This leaves less time for writing then I have in the winter (winter is coming!). But setting this aside, I'll return with a a recap of a couple of recent outings.

For starters I purchased a small kayak. Elle and I have a canoe but it's a two person boat and I often end up going solo. It's an inexpensive kayak -a Perception Sport- great for noodling around. I've been out on Cedar River Flow, the Hudson River and the Kayaderosseras Creek. It's not a boat I'd use for whitewater or on a big lake if the wind was blowing but it's great for low-key day trips.

A point worth noting is the need to clean your boat before moving it among different bodies of water. My first outings in the kayak were on the Kayaderosseras Creek -a lowland creek in Saratoga County. I then put the boat on the Cedar River Flow in the central Adirondacks. To prevent the inadvertent spread of aquatic invasive species I cleaned the kayak thoroughly between those outings. New York State now requires that boats be cleaned before entry into many bodies of water and the State has created an enforcement and education program. You can learn more about it here. Take this seriously. There are several aquatic invasives that, once they gain a foothold, cause immense damage and are nearly impossible to get rid. Keeping them out is the only real solution.

A family of Common Mergansers on the Kayaderosseras Creek near Grey's Crossing (early July 2014). Severe bank erosion is common along the lower Kayaderosseras. Also common are invasive plants such as Japanese Knotweed. A local group --Friends of the Kayaderosseras-- are attempting to control the spread of Knotweed. A couple of methods have been tried but Knotweed is really really hard to kill. A recent post to the group's website details plans to simply cut the Knotweed down repeatedly until its' root energy stores are exhausted (or they are).

Issues aside, the Kayaderosseras from Grey's Crossing to Saratoga Lake has a surprisingly wild feel. Bird life is abundant and at appropriate water levels it's a fun, easy, paddle.  

The Driscoll Road launch site. The water level pictured here is ideal for a relaxed float downstream with enough flow that you don't have to get out and pull through shallow sections. Care is needed during wet weather. The Kayaderossas drains a large watershed and it can rise quickly to levels that are much less relaxed. For several miles below Grey's Crossing the route pass through Saratoga Spa State Park (on one or both sides). The site pictured here is an official launch site on state land with Parking on Driscoll Road. This site requires some effort to get down to the water and a carry of a couple of hundred yards from the parking lot but otherwise this is a good put in or take out point.  

Japanese Knotweed (Fallopia japonica) on the bank of the Kayaderosseras Creek.  

Cedar River Flow

Cedar River Flow is large lake formed by a dam on the Cedar River. The main body of the flow is over three miles long with numerous  bays and extensive wild marshes. Boats with motors are allowed but the launch is suitable only for boats you can carry or wheel to the water by hand (limiting the size of both the boats and their motors). Mostly it's a canoe and kayak paradise. The far end (the south end) of the Flow features extensive marshes where the Cedar River flow into the lake. You can paddle up the Cedar River for several miles (or many miles for the more determined) and the hardest part is finding the actual river channel through the marsh.

In late June (2014) I watched two Osprey pull fish out of the lake. Osprey are pretty common in the Adirondacks and when you see them they are a large and impressive bird. On this day a Bald Eagle flew in to check out the fishing and I was able to see the Osprey and the Eagle in flight within a couple of hundred yards of each other. From this I learned from that Bald Eagles are really big birds. The Eagle's wingspan is only a little larger than an Osprey but the Eagle is a much larger and heavier bird. In general, Cedar River Flow is a great place to view Adirondack birds. Along with the Osprey and the Eagle there were Loons, Waxwings, an American Bittern, Great Blue Herons, Canada Geese (nesting), Turkey's (on the road in) and many other common birds.

An absolutely gorgeous day. Late June 2014.

Beaver Dam on Payne Brook. A second source of inflow into Cedar River Flow

At the upper end of the lake I navigated up a narrow channel thinking it was the Cedar River. It was a dead end but worth the trip anyway.

The view from a well used (and probably illegal) camping spot that sits on a small knoll above the Cedar River.  

Leanto on the Cedar River. About 1.5 miles upstream from where the river flows into the lake. 

The river past the leanto leads deeper into the Moose River Plains. The "plains" are a glacial out wash zone characterized by sandy soils and relatively raw glacial features. The Cedar River has a mostly sandy bottom and it cuts through small ridges where only a foot or two of top soil overlay extensive deposits of sand and gravel.

Little Hoover Dam

Elle and I got out yesterday for a few hours of walking in Lincoln Mountain State Forest. This area is less than 30 minutes from our home and it's both bigger (1000 acres) and wilder than the Hemlock Forest (though it is equally wet and swampy). Lincoln "Mountain" is a bit of a misnomer. The mountain tops out at 1000 feet and it's really just a bump on the Adirondack upslope that lies to the northwest of Saratoga Springs.

The area is crisscrossed with old roads and stone walls and 100 years ago most of it would have been cleared of trees and in active use for various types of agriculture. There are a few places where the trees appear to be older; protected we guess by the general swampiness of the area. There are several small swampy ponds in the area, and seen yesterday (4/20/2014), one was looking particularly pond like (Image One). Image Two, a screen capture of Google Earth imagery from July 2013, shows the swamp with very little open water.

Image One

Image Two

One of our favorite places at Lincoln Mountain is the outlet of this pond/swamp. The main outlet flows from the lower right in Image Two. We walked over to take a look and found just a trickle of water. That seemed odd. Following it upstream for a short distance revealed the reason; one of the larger beaver dams that I've seen. It's difficult to convey the extent of this dam in pictures and I highlighted the "face" of the dam in Image Four. The dam is at least 75 feet long and 4 to 5 feet high in the center. 

Image 5 shows the water backed up behind the dam. The striking thing about this dam is its' height. The dam is four to five feet high in the center. Also, this dam is not the porous structure that you commonly see. Very little water is flowing through the dam. This is clearly a multi-year effort and it could even be multi-generational. As of April 2014 the dam looks pretty solid, but, there's a lot of water backed up behind it and if it were to fail all at once a lot of water going somewhere in a hurry.

 Large beaver dam

The face of the dam is highlighted in yellow

Water backed up behind the dam

Spring, Robins and Oriental Bittersweet

Got out into the forest yesterday (April 6) and the end of a long cold winter is finally here. I had not walked in the forest for a couple of months so I was out just to enjoy the "spring like" conditions (48f with a brisk breeze; snow and ice remaining where ever it has shelter from the sun). Happily, as often happens, I noticed two interesting things during this stroll.

The first was watching Robins feeding on the berries of Oriental Bittersweet. If you've read any of my other posts you know that Oriental Bittersweet has had visible effects on the forest in these here parts and during yesterday's walk I saw an effect I had not previously considered. As I walked I was checking birds to see what species were about on an early spring day and I notice that a group of American Robins were feeding on Oriental Bittersweet berries.

Robins' eating berries is hardly news. My Peterson Eastern Birds guide even notes this as a common "winter" behavior. But, the thing is, Robins were prominently present in Saratoga Springs throughout the winter this year and it was a very tough winter. I saw Robins near my house all winter long and, for much of the winter, a group of 10 or so roosted a large Yew bush just outside my back door. The bush had acquired a canopy of ice and snow which apparently provided some shelter from the wind and cold. I also saw Robins outside my office window (on the other side of town) throughout the winter; usually in a cluster of ornamental crab apple trees.

My Perterson Guides (one from the 50s and a 4th Edition published in 1980) both show Saratoga Springs as outside of the Robin winter range (though only by 100 miles or so). So the question is; does the presence of overwintering Robins represent an extension of their winter range or is it more a case the representation seen in these books being off by what at the scale of the maps is is small amount? The bonus question is, assuming that Robins are extending their winter range, what role are non-native plant species playing in this development? Oriental Bittersweet is present in significant quantities throughout the city as are other non-native trees and shrubs (ornamentals) that bear fruits and berries. Have these human alterations allowed the Robin to extend its' winter range by providing additional food sources? This is a specific example of the larger questions I have about the role humans are playing in altering ecological communities at regional scales.

Flooded hardwood forest area at the south end of the Hemlock Forest; April 6th, 2014

The second "interesting" thing I noted was related to my absolute favorite species present in the Hemlock Forest. As I walked into the woods I wondered if Deer Ticks (Black Legged Ticks) would be active at this point in early spring. I commonly take precautions against ticks such as spraying my pants with tick repellent but I left the house without thinking about ticks. This seemed safe if only because the grasses and plants where they tend to wait for potential meals are mostly still frozen or semi-frozen. However, habits being what they are I periodically checked my clothes for unwanted guests. Nearing the end of the walk I noticed a small black spot on my pant leg. Thinking that it was probably dirt I picked it off and lo and behold it started scurrying across my finger tip. Spring is really here. The Deer Ticks are on the prowl.

My First TriCorder

It's not quite a tricorder, yet, at least not as I remember them from Star Trek. But the smartphone in my pocket is an amazing device and the "possible" is evolving and expanding at a fantastic rate. I'm convinced that the combination of GPS, sensors and recording technologies into common devices will change the way we learn about our world.

A few months ago I wrote about the accuracy of the four GPS capable devices I had access to. The results of those tests can be found here. Not surprisingly I found that my two hand-held GPS units were significantly more accurate than the smartphone I was using at that time. Especially when the GPS handhelds were given a minute to average out accuracy limiting discrepancies that are inherent in the global positioning system.

I recently upgraded my phone to a Google Nexus 5 - a top of the line Android-based smartphone. Informal tests of the GPS capabilities of this phone show it to be as good or better than my GPS handhelds. The phone consistently produces results that are accurate in the 3 to 5 meter range. That's the standard for uncorrected GPS and more accurate fixes require correction and averaging of some kind. Previous generations of smartphones did not generally apply these corrections but it appears that the newest ones do. In short, my new phone consistently out performs all the other GPS devices I've previously used including the dedicated GPS handhelds.

But it's really the full range of capabilities that the phone incorporates, and the potential for those capabilities to be integrated, that makes this so exciting and intriguing. Michael Goodchild wrote about the potential of "citizens as sensors" in 2007. He identified several roadblocks to the usefulness of citizen sensors that mostly come down to questions of reliability. For research purposes accuracy is important, but the ability to quantify the level of accuracy is essential. Smartphones can record the data you want to get as well as data that says how accurate the data should be. Several of the GPS apps for my phone show the accuracy of the fix in real time and you can watch the accuracy change in response to satellites going in and out of view.

This blog and the Hemlock Forest research project are coalescing around this idea of "citizen sensoring". It's also March 1st today so the end of this colder than average winter is in sight or, at least, that's the thought we keep in mind to retain our sanity. Spring IS coming and I need to prepare for the spring-time phase of my project field work.

Citizen Sensor resources include:
Academic Biology and its Discontents
Citizen Sensors Improve World Health
Smart Citizen Fab Lab <== open source sensor hardware
Smart Citizen KickStarter
More on open source sensor kits

Citizen Science Data Management Guide


This Post: Resources and References
Goodchild, M.F. (2007). "Citizens as sensors: the world of volunteered geography". GeoJournal 69 (4): 211–221. doi:10.1007/s10708-007-9111-y
GPS Accuracy Comparison (http://dataliterate.blogspot.com/2013/11/gps-accuracy.html)

Spatial Data: Pattern and Process

The topic for this post comes from an article I've just read titled; Data Science and Prediction. In the article Vassant Dhar provides a brief overview of data science and new thinking about the relationship between theory and evidence. Dhar states the idea nicely saying that data science is different because it rests on the premise that the data can reveal the interesting questions. Traditional data analysis works the other way around starting with theory and looking to data for evidence to support or dispute the theory. Data science look for patterns in data and then ask if there are interesting questions those patterns might answer. This approach is not entirely new. The history of science is full of stories where an unexpected pattern in data led to new discoveries. What is new is that we now have a lot more data to analyze. Anyway, it's a good article, well worth reading.

The broad topics discussed in the article; data science and "big data" are of great interest to me. In fact, these topics are the central themes of my other blog. That's right, I have a second blog and it is called Pattern and Process.

Pattern and Process can into being first and it is intended for a different audience. Still, if you are reading this you might find it interesting. It's all about the technical issues and concerns that go along with research methods designed to find patterns in data; especially data that has a geographic or spatial context.

While I'm on the topic of influences and resources, I've also been reading In Search of Swampland by Ralph Tiner. This book provides a surprisingly readable introduction to the hydrology and biology of swamps (let's be honest, it's not the most exciting of topics). Central to the discussion is that swamps come in many

different varieties. This led the broad use of the term wetland to categorize lands where the presence of water changes both the form and the function of the place. This would be one of those rather dry academic subjects if it weren't for the regulatory protection of wetlands by governments at various levels. I'm sure I'll return to this topic at some point, there are marked wetlands in various parts of the Hemlock Forest, but for now the book is highly recommended.

One more book that will provide insight into the topic(s) of this blog is Forest Forensics, A Field Guide to Reading the Forested Landscape by Tom Wessels. Read this book and a walk through a forest in the northeastern United States will never be the same. Many forested areas in the northeastern U.S. were cleared land in the middle of the 1800s. This book helps you recognize and interpret clues that can tell the history of of how the land was used in the past and when that use was abandoned.





References:
Dhar Vassant, Data Science and Prediction, Communications of the ACM, 12/2013, Vol. 56 No. 12

Pattern and Process ( http://dataliterate.blogspot.com/ )

Tiner, Ralph; In Search of Swampland, Second Edition; Rutgers University Press, 2005

Wessels, Tom; Forest Forensics, A Field Guide to Reading Forested Landscapes, Countryman Press; September 20, 2010