Field Notes

<--2017-08-23 10:55:00 | 2017-09-19 11:55:00-->
Other sites visited today: Bouldin Alfalfa | Twitchell Alfalfa
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Bouldin Corn: 2017-09-06 10:30:00 (DOY 249)
Author: Joe Verfaillie
Others: Kyle

Summary: Standard fieldwork, nearby fields being harvested, Fix 7700 settings again, fixed SRS NDVI/PRI loose wire problem, tower lost power on night of 2017-09-02, Watermelons!

Bouldin Corn
2017-09-06

Kyle and I arrived at about 10:30. It was sunny, mild and hazy with a light breeze from the northwest. We do not have a combo for the gate off of Hwy 12. Apparently someone was using that gate early in the morning to access the fields to grow marijuana and Ben doesnâ€™t want to give out the combo any more. We came from the Alfalfa site â€“ very dusty roads. Corn fields to the north of Hwy 12 have been harvested or are being harvested now as well as the fields near the shop entrance. Tyler later reported that our field would be harvested in about two weeks. I looks like they are almost immediately disking or plowing the edges (at least) of the fields they harvest so we will need to pull our ground sensors in the next week or so.

The 7500 read: 401.5ppm CO2, 798.8mmol/m3 H2O, 26.9C, 101.0kPa, 97.9SS â€“ 100.3 after cleaning
The 7700 read: 1.90ppm CH4, 28.9RSSI â€“ 74.9 after cleaning
The 7700â€™s heating and wash settings were wrong. The heaters were on all day at 100% power. I change them to be on between 8pm and 8am at 4% power and 30RSSI threshold. The wash was set to only wash once a day. I set it up for the usual every three hours. The manual pump and spin worked just fine.

The SRS NDVI and PRI sensors had some problems. NDVI in was reading NAN initially. I think it was a bad connection of a power wire. I moved wires around and tightened screw terminals until I got all four reading again.

It looked like there was a full set of camera images on the CFM card. I did not upgrade the CR1000 OS.

I cleaned the radiometers but did not check the tipping bucket.

Kyle took three corn stalks for biomass. The corn was very dusty with pollen, dirt and tiny bugs that were crawling on everything. He also did LAI but could not get the above, auto-logging to be recognized by the console. He did the below protocol and got an LAI of about 5.

The battery voltage dropped from 12.1 to 11.6V on 2017-07-12, the day we moved the tower closer to the field. The tower lost data on the night of 2017-09-02 and came back on 2017-09-03 10:00.

We found big watermelons in the weeds near the tower. We picked three to take home and left at least one smaller one for next time.

Veg Height (cm): Tape measure from ground to top of plant
321, 300, 324, avg = 315, stdev = 13.08

1 photos found

20170906BC_Watermelon.jpg ( 2017-09-06 10:36:54 ) Full size: 1920x1440
Volunteer watermellow