NEON protocols, part 2 (non-periodic)

After a pleasant Christmas I'm back to wrap up this short series on the various activities I got to take part in over the field season with NEON (the National Ecological Observatory Network). Part 1 covered the protocols we performed throughout the season. This post will look at the remainder.

These protocols I'm calling, for lack of a better term, non-periodic. They had windows of time (typically a few weeks to months) during the year during which they could be conducted, and our job was to perform them in as many different plots as possible during that time. (With some limitations, certain protocols only applied to certain types of plots.)

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Plant Diversity (DIV)

This was the first non-periodic protocol we did, and is also probably my favorite. The window opened around the time I began in April, and closed in early summer. The basic concept is simple: we looked for as many plant species as we could find in a plot.

A beautiful field of Elaphoglossum wawrae ferns.

In practice, it was a little more complicated. We were looking for vascular plant species, so didn't count mosses or other bryophytes. We also counted at various scales and locations around the plot. Each plot was a 20×20 m square, and we would count species at certain 1 m² subplots within it, at 10 m² subplots, and within the four 100 m² quadrants that made up the plot.

Maile (Alyxia stellata) fruit; they often grow in chains, one out of the other.

Looking at different spatial scales provided some interesting information on the biodiversity at each plot. In some plots, most of the species in the plot could be found within a single 1×1 m square, while in others there would be comparatively few in such a small area but a large number in aggregate across the entire plot.

ʻIeʻie (Fraycinetia arborea) fruits, somewhat rare to see.

This protocol was essentially a big treasure hunt for plants, and I enjoyed it a lot. It happening early in the season was helpful (as it really kickstarted our plant species knowledge), but I was sad that it also ended early, since it was so much fun. It was great for really getting to know the various different climates and environments around the Natural Area Reserve (NAR), from lava fields less than two hundred years old with grasses and sparse ʻōhiʻa, to dense koa forest, to lower and wetter rainforest disturbed by pigs, and a few more besides.

Coarse Downed Wood (CDW)

This protocol was about tallying up and recording information about downed trees. For each plot, we'd walk 90 m out from the center along three transects (lines) 120° from each other and record dead wood we encountered along the way. This was…among my less-favorite protocols, for reasons I'll get to. Its window also opened early in the season, but didn't close until near the end. We stopped doing it around the end of June because other protocols (see below) crowded it out, and I wasn't sad to see the end of it…until we ended up doing it again a few months later once things finally calmed down a bit and we realized we still had a few weeks left in the window and a few more plots to perform it at.

In theory, it was simple: follow a line through the woods using a compass, measure out 90 meters, and record dead wood that the line crossed. Each piece of dead wood was termed a “particle” (a term I found amusing from a physics standpoint). There was a nuance that particles below a certain diameter weren't tallied (so you weren't recording every dead twig), and that minimum diameter was a function of distance along the transect (so – just making up some arbitrary numbers – a branch 10 cm in diameter encountered at 2 m along the transect would be recorded, but if it were encountered more than 30 m along the transect it would no longer be recorded as it would be considered too small to count. I didn't fully understand it, but there were published statistical reasons behind this.).

That still wasn't too complicated, but if you got into a situation where the transect encountered multiple forks of the same dead branch or tree, it got way more complicated with a bunch of measurements that needed to be done to determine an ‘average diameter’ to see if it got recorded. Frustratingly, this could result in spending 10 minutes making measurements and doing calculations only for the resulting value to be too small, and all that work being for naught. Thankfully that was rare, but I definitely didn't enjoy it when it happened.

Most of the time, the transect would cross a particle at one point along its length, which made measurement of its diameter simpler, but not necessarily easy. With many plots in mature rainforest, a lot of the dead wood we encountered was in advanced stages of decomposition; it was often hard to get a diameter (or even determine limits) as the log was slowly turning into dirt (“tree puddles,” we called them).

On top of such difficulties, running transects through the forest could be quite arduous. The transects went straight on, with no consideration for the roughness of the terrain or plants through with they passed. Those same dead trees we were recording could, when crossing our path, make getting past them pretty difficult – it's remarkable how many trees fall in such a way, suspended slightly above the forest floor, that it's hard to get either under or over them. The final plot we performed CDW at had a patch of uluhe (Dicranopteris linearis) so dense that we had to go around, but in general we went straight through thick, thin, and thicket.

Dicranopteris linearis, one of three fern species called uluhe in Hawaiian. It forms dense thickets.

It would be remiss of me not to mention that CDW could be very easy and quick in plots on newer land that didn't have any large dead trees yet. In some plots, walking a 90 m transect could take two hours or more; in others, it could take ten minutes. And while I personally didn't enjoy it much, it was the favorite protocol of a few of my coworkers, unlike:

Below Ground Biomass (BGB)

Hoo boy. Where to start with Below Ground Biomass? (It actually had a second official name, but I don't remember it as we all just called in BGB.) Where CDW had its share of people who both liked and disliked it, pretty much no one enjoyed BGB (it's definitely my least-favorite protocol). The basic premise was simple: at certain plots, we would extract a ‘brownie’ of soil, including all the roots in it. We would then carefully rinse the dirt away and strain out the roots, which we would then pick over and sort into bins based on their diameter. I forget the exact cut-off points, but they were in the single-digit millimeter range; these were small roots. The extracted roots would then be dried, weighed, and a portion of them would be ground up to be sent off for analysis.

While the soil retrieval and washing weren't too bad, the root sorting was simultaneously mind-numbingly tedious and exhausting. We spent several weeks over the middle of summer doing little else other than sitting bent over a tray of roots in water in the lab, picking out teen-tiny roots one by one with forceps. I didn't mind it too much the first few days…but by the time we finally finished it we were all ready to snap at the sight of another root. I forgot to take any photos of this protocol, but frankly, you're not missing much.

One notable incident involving this protocol was the first time I was using the Wiley mill to grind up some roots after we'd finished sorting and drying them. These machines are not cheap, to put it lightly, so when I managed to get it into a non-starting state when accidentally over-stuffing it with roots I had some very worried thoughts pass through my head. Thankfully, the fix was simple; I'd simply blown a $5 fuse that was easily replaced, though it had to be sourced off-island because it wasn't a common configuration.

Soils (SLS)

I almost forgot this one, because it was a relatively easy protocol that went by quickly. This despite the fact that we performed it twice during the season, once around May/June and again around September (to capture soil chemistry at different seasonal conditions). Similarly to BGB it involved collecting soil samples from plots, but the analysis of those samples was much simpler: just a little lab work to prepare them for shipping to a central laboratory for further analysis (and most of that only had to be done the first time, in June). The most difficult part of SLS was simply finding deep enough soil to get a sample; we had to sample from a list of random coordinates in the plots, which would sometimes be pointing at roots, places where the soil was a half-inch deep, and other unhelpful locations. In such cases, we'd cross off the coordinates and move to the next until one happened to coincide with sufficiently-deep soil. Still, even with that slowdown, this protocol only took about two weeks each time, with soil samples being collected from multiple plots per day (versus other protocols that could take multiple days to finish a single plot).

Vegetation Structure (VST)

One such protocol was Vegetation Structure, the last protocol in the season. VST was another divisive one, though in the opposite direction from CDW: some of my coworkers disliked it, but I actually quite enjoyed it. Where CDW measured dead wood, VST involved measuring the living; specifically, trees and small woody shrubs. The exact measurements varied slightly by size and category, but generally included things like a stem or trunk diameter and height, plus sometimes various other bits of data like the extent of the crown, the health status of the plant, or the position in the forest (ranging from Open Grown to Full Shade). 

Me marking a decumbent (but still living) hapuʻu pulu (Cibotium glaucum).

As part of the protocol we'd tag each plant measured and mark where we measured the diameter so that future field techs could reproduce the measurement. Many plants were already marked from the last time VST was done (five years ago for some plots), but new plants would grow large enough to be measured in the intervening time so we usually had a few ‘adders’ in each plot.

Me rewiring a tag around a maile stem (foreground).

I liked VST, but I can understand why some people found it arduous. One facet even I agreed on was the requirement for measuring the extent of the crowns of trees. In a thick forest, for mature trees (or even young but tall ones) this can be, to put it mildly, difficult. The best method usually involved two people making their way out to beneath the edges of the crown on opposite sides (as best they could guess) and measuring the distance between them. This was prone, we felt, to a high level of systematic error as it was often not at all easy figuring out where a particular tree's leaves and branches extended to or how directly ‘underneath’ it we were, especially when such leaves were 15 or more meters in the air and surrounded by leaves from other trees. The height of a tree could also be difficult to ascertain, even with the electronic range finders we were using, and prone to large systematic error.

Old growth koa forest (one of only two plots). The orange color is lichen that grows on koas preferentially.

Still, other than having to scrabble around in leaf litter to find tags on downed hapuʻu tree ferns, I generally enjoyed VST. I was able to put my Python skills to use with the data we collected this year to make some graphs for the annual report we were obligated to provide as part of our agreement to be able to use the NAR. Some protocols (including VST) only get done every five years in some plots; this was one of those years, and since the Hawaiʻi NEON site was established relatively recently in 2018 this was only the second time some of those measurements had been taken. It was really exciting to see how the trends looked, and I could even pick out different environments in the plots clustering in certain parts of the phase space.

One notable result from this year was that a lot of our trees actually shrank in diameter compared to five years ago. That's because this was a really, really dry year and the trunks had shrunk from lack of water. The trees had generally gotten taller, so they were definitely still growing, they just weren't growing out as much. Hopefully next year brings some rain, we could really use it. (But given how miserable working in the rain was when it did happen, a part of me is glad this year was a dry as it was.)

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So there you have it: a rough outline of what the 2025 NEON field season looked like. We started out with DIV and CDW, transitioned into SLS then into BGB for an interminable few weeks over the summer, started VST (and SLS again), realized we were making excellent time on VST and that the CDW window was still open, so finished off CDW and VST near the end of the season. And of course, in the background, all the periodic protocols were being conducted as well. It's quite the symphony of science being coordinated and conducted by NEON, carried out at sites across the US each year. It should hopefully run for about another twenty years, and it'll be interesting to see just what kinds of things we learn from such a large-scale project. As an open-access project, all the data collected are available here; as an astronomer, with a commitment to open knowledge, that was one of the things that initially drew me to this job.

My family's coming to visit on New Year's Eve, so this'll probably be my last post for the year as I prepare for that, and what a year it's been! I've given up on trying predict the future and where I might end up working, but in the near term: next semester I'll be teaching a few courses in physics and astronomy at my alma mater, the University of Hawaii at Hilo. Having never taught in a formal setting before I'm quite nervous, even as everyone tells me what a good teacher I'll make. We'll see I suppose! Big changes ahead next year. Hauʻoli Makahiki Hou, a hui hou!

NEON protocols, part 1 (periodic)

It's been a month since my job with NEON ended, and as another chapter of my life draws to a close I wanted to take one last look back at the various data collection activities we carried out. Each of the protocols below had an extensive document describing its execution in detail, which we had to be brought up to speed on before performing the protocol (and would not-infrequently refer to in the field for clarification). I probably don't remember them perfectly so I might get specifics wrong, and also the protocols are always subject to updating and revision based on best practices and experience gained in the field, so don't rely on this for future NEON field seasons!

Of the protocols, there were two broad categories: one type was repeated at a certain cadence – weekly, fortnightly, monthly – while the other was confined to certain windows of time in the year during which we'd try to get it done for as many plots as possible. I'll start with the repeating protocols, as those were the constant background cadence we became used to, then go through the season in chronological order covering the rest in a second post (as this one ballooned to longer than I expected). I've tried to include some photos where I can, but I didn't always remember to take them for every protocol.

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Phenology (PHE)

Phenology (a word I hadn't heard before starting with NEON) is, according to Merriam-Webster: “the study of periodic events in biological life cycles and how these are influenced by seasonal and interannual variations in climate, as well as habitat factors (such as elevation).” For us, it involved a weekly walk along an eight-hundred-meter stretch of road and checking on…I think it was some two hundred individual plants along the way. For each plant we'd record various data (though the specifics varied by plant type). Some typical data points would be things like does this plant have any new leaves growing? Are any of its leaves changing color or falling? Does it have flowers? (And if so, how many, and what fraction are fully open?) Likewise for fruit – are any present, and how many of them are ripe?

Thankfully, for our sanity, we didn't have to count every single instance of a flower or fruit on a plant, as the survey divided things up into bins of increasing numerical size:

• <3
• 3–10
• 11–100
• 101–1,000
• 1001–10.000
• >10,000

On small shrubs it'd be easy to say, for instance, that there were only two fruits (<3), while on some large trees (especially ʻōhiʻa) we could easily see upwards of ten thousand young leaves budding at certain times of year. (ʻŌhiʻa leaves come in bunches of a certain average amount, so we could simply count those and multiply.)

For instance, above is a closeup of a pūkiawe plant, one of the species we looked at. It grows as a shrub to a small spindly tree depending on environment, and puts out lots of tiny leaves and fruits. Those fruits are about the size of a BB and a large individual could have over a thousand, not to mention upwards of ten thousand leaves (thankfully those also came in clusters for easier counting). Most species weren't as complicated to measure as pūkiawe (they were definitely on the more time-consuming end of the spectrum), but it'd still take around 4–6 hours to cover every plant.

As mentioned, this was our most frequent protocol, happening every single week. In our tropical climate we didn't see quite such dramatic changes over time as the mainland U.S. would with deciduous trees, but we could still see things like the ʻākala (Hawaiian raspberry) budding, flowering, and fruiting over the summer months.

Beetles (BET)

Happening every two weeks, beetles was another frequent protocol that ran almost the length of the season. We left three ground-fall traps at specific locations around six plots (for a total of eighteen traps) scattered across the Puʻu Makaʻala Natural Area Reserve (NAR), and every fortnight we'd collect the contents of those traps for sorting and identification of any beetles they contained. We were looking specifically for any species in the Carabidae family, a family of mostly-ground dwelling beetles with species around the globe (though the native Hawaiian species are arboreal, funnily enough). We found both native and invasive Carabidae species, with certain plots being known for the distribution either way, or for being the only plot that some species had been found at. While we didn't discover any new species this season, previous seasons turned up two entirely new species, so there are potentially more out there waiting to be found!

At the end of the season, after all the beetles had been identified, we started working on pointing them. Not “pinning” them, as they were too small for that (around 5–6 mm, on average), though the goal is the same: preservation for later viewing. The “det D. Berke” on the label in the photo above signifies that I identified this particular specimen (a common native species), which is pretty neat! We didn't manage to finished pointing all the beetles before us seasonal staff left, but we got through quite a lot of ~240 beetles – I personally pointed upwards of 70 over a few weeks. (I found it quite relaxing after a day out in the field when we had an hour or two left on the clock back at the office, like a miniature arts-and-crafts project.)

Beetles sorted out of a trap, ready for identification under the microscope.

Mosquitoes (MOS)

Mosquitoes happened once a month, but was probably the most disruptive protocol we did. It involved three parts:

1. A team would go up in the afternoon to set ten mosquito traps at various location in the NAR. These had to be set within four hours of sunset, and would sit overnight.
2. Another team would go up early the next morning and check all the traps for mosquitoes, taking any catches and resetting the traps. (This checking had to happen within four hours of dawn.)
3. Yet another team would go up in the afternoon and check all the traps a second time after they had sat out during the day, then collect them and bring them and any catches down.

A mosquito trap.

The protocol wasn't particularly difficult, but it did involve some of the more technical work we did, as we carefully calibrated CO₂ canisters to put off a stream of carbon dioxide to attract mosquitoes towards a little fan blowing into a canister. Most of the traps were located near roads (as in the photo the above), though there was one lovingly termed “the long walk” which took nearly 10 minutes to reach. (Which doesn't sound like much, until you're carrying a heavy CO₂ canister and the rest of the equipment down a muddy trail…)

We usually didn't catch a lot of mosquitoes, which was a good thing. Mosquitoes carry avian malaria, which is driving the extinction of multiple native Hawaiian bird species at lower elevations. Mosquitoes can only survive temperatures down a certain level, though, and at the height of Puʻu Makaʻala it's mostly too cold, so birds which can retreat to higher elevations are generally still safe. (Shorter islands, such as Kauaʻi, are watching their native bird populations die out in slow motion without being able to do much about it, as there simply isn't high enough elevation for the birds to retreat to as the atmosphere warms and the mosquito-free range shrinks.) On a typical bout we might catch 0–2 mosquitoes, and usually only in the lower-elevation traps. This is compared to places on the mainland where, with the same traps, they might catch hundreds or thousands of mosquitos – I remember watching a training video for this protocol, where the presenter up-ended a catch cup and a literal pile of mosquitoes several centimeters in height fell out. Thankfully, we didn't have to deal with that, and almost never had to worry about getting bitten during our time in the field.

Leaf Litter (LTR)

Another monthly protocol, this one involved collecting leaf litter from aerial ‘traps’ in the forest and separating it into various components. These traps were pretty simple, just some mesh suspended by PVC pipe – they didn't need to be complicated, just a standardized area to collect what fell from above.

Me, collecting leaf litter from a trap near the end of the season.

Once the litter was collected into bags (from I believe 20 traps in different plots), we'd heat it to dry it out and then sort it into various functional groups. These were things like leaves, twigs, ‘woody’ (bits of bark),  flowers, seeds, ‘other’ (for, e.g., lichen and other rare things that didn't fit other categories) and ‘mixed’, a catch-all term for leftover material. According to the protocol, each bag was only to be sorted for one hour maximum, at the end of which any remaining unsorted material would go into ‘mixed’. This was partly for mainland domains where the amount of leaf litter in fall could be overwhelming, but we found it useful as well when all the easily-identifiable stuff has been sorted out and what's left is just tiny detritus. (Sorting could also end early if the remaining unsorted material was no more than 10% of the mass of the sample, which was usually pretty easy to judge.)

A tray showing an in-progress sort; in the bottom-left is the remaining unsorted material, then going clockwise we have a small amount of ‘other’, some twigs, a little woody material, a lot of leaves, flowers (mostly pistils and stamens from ʻōhiʻa lēhua flowers), and two seeds.

While this litter was a monthly protocol, there was also another type of litter that happens just once a year, around September. This protocol (ground litter) involved gathering litter from areas demarcated on the ground which were larger than the aerial traps. While the monthly litter collection focused on small litter (sticks too large would be discarded), ground litter collection was something of the opposite, only interested in sticks and leaves (such as tree fern fronds) larger than a certain limit.

(While mosquitoes had “the long walk”, litter had the really long walk to get to some of the plots where collection happened, something like half an hour's hike along a fence pushing through ferns.)

Imageomics

There was one additional repeating activity we did, though this wasn't a normal NEON protocol; a number of people from different universities teamed up to use NEON's Research Support Services, where outside research groups can contract to get support from NEON personnel for their research. In our case, they set up a number of trail cameras and audio recorders around the NAR, with the goal of developing machine-learning systems to automatically identify native and endangered birds for better tracking. They set up the system in January of this year, and we mostly just swapped batteries and SD cards on a regular basis to keep things moving (plus uploading data from the cards, and the occasional bit of troubleshooting for cameras that weren't working). I believe they gave a presentation at a machine vision/machine learning conference last month so hopefully the project is going well, but I don't know too much about it otherwise. It was a fairly easy activity, though, and let me see some parts of the NAR that we normally otherwise wouldn't.

I saw these nēnē fairly close up in one of the areas we wouldn't normally be.

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I originally intended to talk about all the protocols in this post but even just the repeating ones turned out to be a fruitful subject. I'll have another post covering our non-periodic protocols soon where we'll wrap up by going over what my field season looked like. A hui hou!

Pyrographic presents

As the end of the season approached, and it came time for us seasonal field technicians to say goodbye to NEON, I decided to make some little gifts for all my coworkers. Between moving and work I didn't have a lot of time to think about it (or make things) so I settled rather hastily on some small wood-burning (pyrography) pieces. Since I get bored of doing the same thing over and over I decided to do a unique design for each person based on what I knew they liked or enjoyed about the work we did. I've grouped them into a few categories below:

1. Plants

ʻĀhinahina (silversword) and Peperomia sp.

I did these for two coworkers who mentioned these plants as being their favorites. On the left is a Mauna Loa silversword (Argyroxiphium kauense), or ʻāhinahina in Hawaiian. We were privileged to see some of these that were outplanted in the Puʻu Makaʻala Natural Area Reserve (out of reach of voracious ungulates!), and they're just as beautiful as the Mauna Kea species.

Leaves of Peperomia sp. from beneath

The disk on the right shows leaves from a species of Peperomia (using the photo above as reference). There are over a thousand recognized Peperomia species (at least twenty-two in Hawaii alone), and there are thought to be more since they can be hard to tell apart and positive identification can be very difficult. While we normally would (and could) identify most plants to the species level with confidence, we simply couldn't identify any peperomias we found to better than the genus level. They're pretty plants, though, with strikingly-colored undersides to their leaves.

2. Beetles

Mecyclothorax neonomas and M. rufipennis

As part of the work we did we collected, identified, and preserved various Carabidae beetles. Members of this large and varied family are found around the world, with both native and invasive species present in Hawaii. Shown here are two native species from the genus Mecyclothorax, M. neonomas on the left and M. rufipennis on the right. M. neonomas was actually discovered just a few years ago at our site from the kind of collection work we did (one of two such species), which is pretty neat! We didn't find any new species this year (beetles in general were scarcer than the previous few years), but there could be more out there waiting to be discovered…

3. Birds

Nēnē, ʻiʻiwi, & ʻalalā

Birds ended up being the biggest category, as we got to see a lot of endangered and rare native birds in the Natural Area Reserve. Nēnē were a very common sight; we would often see between ten to twenty on any given day. (This was the first one of these wood-burnings that I made, so it's a bit less polished than the others as I was relearning it on the fly). In the middle is an ʻiʻiwi, a striking native scarlet honeycreeper with a dramatically curved bill. I modeled this after a photo of one perched on a māmane tree, and while I didn't get its front quite right I like the contrast with the black wing and tail feathers. (The light was at a poor angle for this disk specifically, so I had to play with it a bit in GIMP to get it to look better.)

The third bird is one which I haven't actually seen personally, and isn't currently at the site: it's an ʻalalā, the Hawaiian crow. By 2002 there were no known wild individuals, with just a few remaining in captivity. Intensive breeding and rehabilitation programs have increased the captive populations to the point where some individuals were released into the Puʻu Makaʻala Natural Area Reserve several years ago…where they were unfortunately quickly predated by ʻio, the Hawaiian hawk. One of my coworkers, before joining NEON, was part of this effort and used to track the birds around the reserve, so I made this for him. (Amusingly, he immediately could tell from it that I'd used a reference photo of a not-quite-adult bird ­– something I didn't know – as its head was still a little big for its body.) In some good news, around a dozen ʻalalā were recently released in the wild on Maui where there are no ʻio, so hopefully they'll be able to re-establish a wild breeding population there and eventually bring them back to the forests of Hawaiʻi.

4. Tower

The fourth and final category has just a single disk, but it's probably the one I'm most proud of. I made it based on a photo I took of the top of our instrument tower seen through the trees along one of our trails, and I managed to get a lot of details in there. Here's the photo in question, for reference:

Funnily enough, this photo is now out of date: two weeks ago, during my last week with NEON, some site infrastructure people came out and moved one of the boom arms visible on the left to the other side of the tower to better sample the prevailing wind direction. When the tower was originally built in 2018 it was laid out using data on wind direction from Pohakuloa up on the saddle, and no one seems to have thought to question if the wind patterns were the same for a different site. (Spoiler: they aren't.) Our tower had thus, for its existence, had the wind-sampling equipment off to the wrong side for the prevailing winds. It wasn't a huge problem by any means (the tower being in the way probably wasn't affecting things too much), but it's good that it's fixed now.

And that's it! It was nice to have motivation to pull out my wood-burning kit again; when I originally got it I imagined I'd be doing a bit more than I have (so far it's pretty much just been the two pieces in this previous post). Several people said I should sell these, which…with some more practice…we'll see if that goes anywhere, I suppose. A hui hou! (And if any of my coworkers are reading this, thanks for being such an awesome group of people!)

P.S. Also, after a week of intensively cleaning my old place, I'm finally fully moved out, and can concentrate on things around the new place.

Endings (with NEON) and new beginnings

Phew, it's been a month! As mentioned in my last post, my job with NEON has officially ended as of the 20th. I'm also still “moving,” in the sense that I'm still cleaning up my old place and transferring things over to the new one. Moving while simultaneously working a physically-demanding job has been…a lot! But with the free time on my hands this week I've been able to get a significant amount of work done at the old place, and I'm on track to be completely done and moved out by the end of the month.

So yes, this'll be another short post, as my brain is still a bit frazzled by the thousand-and-one things that all need to get done between moving out and moving in. I've got some projects I managed to squeeze out among everything else the past few weeks which I plan to show off soon, once things have calmed down some more.

In all the hustle and bustle I haven't had much time yet to reflect on the end of my time with NEON. It's had its ups (great people, interesting work) and downs (rain!), but it's definitely strange not heading up Mauna Loa this week. I'll have a retrospective on this job when my thoughts have settled a bit more and I've had some time to recover from the previous two hectic months. By my count this is the eighth job that's come to an end for me, so, while it's never easy, it's something I'm (unfortunately) quite familiar with by now. Thankfully none of my coworkers are planning to move off-island (something else I'm familiar with from astronomy jobs ending), so as a band of fire-forged-friends we're able to keep in touch outside of work.

As per usual, I've amassed several project ideas over the past few months which I've been itching to work on. I'll still be somewhat busy in December organizing the new place and preparing for my family to visit in January, but I should finally have some time to pursue some new avenues. I've found myself interested in checking out Typst, a sort of re-imagining of \(\LaTeX\) from the ground up. I've also recently been thinking about getting into woodworking. The new house has a space that looks like it was used for that purpose, and for various reasons (I needed a lawnmower, and there were some amazing Black Friday sales on) I now own several power tools for the first time in my life. We'll see where that goes, but I'm excited. A hui hou!

A move update

Just a quick update to say that the move I mentioned last time has, in a sense, happened. I say “in a sense” because I've moved most of my furniture (with the help of some friends!) and have been sleeping at the new house for the past two weeks, but since I'm also still working full time I haven't yet managed to completely clean everything out of the old place and am also still working on some aspects of the process (like getting internet access set up in the new place).

I've also been doing some interesting things at work as we begin to wind down for the season. We finished our beetle collection earlier this month and have started mounting all the beetles we caught this year (~240) for preservation. I've never mounted insects before, but it's a satisfying arts-and-craft sort of activity in the lab. I've been enjoying it, and once things calm down a bit more I hope to have some photos of the process to show. My last day at work will be November 20th, so I'll have some more free time on my hands before too long (which I am definitely looking forward to, trying to move while also working full time has been…rather exhausting, to say the least). A hui hou!

A move, and a Hawaiian cheesecake

I haven't mentioned it until now, but I'll be moving tomorrow to a new place about 15 minutes' drive outside of Hilo to the town of Pepeʻekeo. It's been a more drawn-out process than moving usually is for me, which is partly why I hadn't mentioned it; it involves moving to a house my parents bought in advance of retirement and, for once, I've been able to set my own time-table. I've been shuttling small loads of stuff to the new place the past few weeks, but tomorrow marks the big move of furniture and changing where I sleep. I'll never enjoy moving, but at least I get to pick when I need to be out by, and can do the moving and then come back and clean (and perhaps finish moving non-essential stuff) after a week settling in rather than needing to get it all done at once.

That's mostly just to say that it might be a bit quiet around here as I get moved in and go through the excruciating process of readjusting all my routines that moving always entails. I don't want to end this post without pointing out something I baked last month, though!

This is an ʻōhelo berry cheesecake I made for a social gathering. The ʻōhelo are present in the form of a compôte on top of a basic cheesecake, and it came out quite well. Even after making this and the pie from before I still have a few cups of ʻōhelo berries in the freezer, so I'm still thinking about what to make with them. There are lots of recipes involving blueberries out there (muffins, perhaps?), so we'll see what I come up with! A hui hou!

Visiting Hakalau Natural Area Reserve

A few weeks ago on September 13 I had the opportunity to attend the annual Find Your Wild open day high on the slopes of Mauna Kea. This event happens only once a year and is limited to 500 people, but it allows members of the public to access the Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge (part of the Natural Area Reserve System, or NARS) and see the rare plants and birds found there. Since we work in a fellow Natural Area Reserve and know many of the people working at Hakalau, most of us from work went as a group.

There were a variety of events going on over the course of the day, with the mains ones being a several-mile-round-trip hike through the woodland in the process of being restored, a tour of the greenhouse where plants are propagated (though we missed out on that), and lots of booths from various conservation organization around the island and state. Judging by the photography equipment a lot of people were there to see the rare native birds, such as the ʻiʻiwi, ʻapapane, ʻakepa, ʻakiapōlāʻau, and ʻelepaio (and others I'm forgetting). We see those birds occasionally in the Puʻu Makaʻala Natural Area Reserve where we work, but on the older slopes of Mauna Kea where the forest has had more time to turn lava rock into nutritious soil the sheer number of birds we saw was incredible. These birds no longer exist at lower elevations (where most of the island's population lives) due to mosquitoes and the deadly avian malaria they carry, so few people get to see or hear them without taking trips to high-elevation woodlands.

Part of the hike. Other than a few trees the entire area was clear-cut just a few decades a go.

Speaking of plants, we also got to see some rare varieties of those. Some of them appear at Puʻu Makaʻala, but again there were some Mauna Kea-specific species which I hadn't seen before. We got to hear from a conservationist there about one particular plant in the mint family, Phyllostegia brevidans, which was first described in 1862 and then disappeared from the record and was thought extinct for around a hundred and fifty years. Sometime earlier this century a single specimen was found by an exploring conservationist. He took some samples, which took six years to be identified from leaf samples in the Bishop Museum collection, after which he was able to return to the same individual plant to try to collect seeds. The plant was half-dead, with a single bunch of moldy fruit, but the seeds he got (remarkably) sprouted, and with some care and attention (and an ungulate-free enclosure to grow in) the plants were returned to the wild and many individuals are now thriving.

However! P. brevidans was previously pollinated by the nectivorous ʻiʻiwi, whose long, curved bills perfectly fit the plant's long, curved flowers. But its numbers had dropped so low for so long that ʻiʻiwi simply passed it by when it was replanted; they likely hadn't seen any in generations, and had completely lost the part of their cultural knowledge that told them it was edible. Thankfully, after some years they eventually figured it out again, and as of a few years ago are once again feeding from (and pollinating) their long-lost symbiotic flora. I can't tell it nearly as well as I heard it, but it was a truly inspiring success story of conservation.

I couldn't get a good photo of the several ʻiʻiwi I saw, so here's a gorgeous 3D-printed one! (Life-size.)

Overall it was a really interesting experience, and was a great way to see some rare and endangered birds and plants. It's a long drive to get there along Mana Road, but it offers some great views that I hadn't seen before. We'll see how often I get to go again (as it requires signing up before slots fill up), but I enjoyed the experience a lot. A hui hou!

A Hawaiian pie

It has been a very busy month here for me, which is why it's been so long since my last post. Some of the busyness has been pleasant (birthday parties!), some…more neutral (being in a hotel while my apartment building was tented this week), but all of it left me with little downtime or drive to write.

One exciting development is that last week I finally managed to make the pie I've been meaning to since about May! The idea was sparked by a comment from a coworker about how one could theoretically bake a pie using ʻākala (native Hawaiian raspberries) and ʻōhelo (native Hawaiian blueberries). The ʻākala ripen earlier (around May/June), so while I had some in the freezer ready to use for a few months it wasn't until late August/early September than the ʻōhelo really started ripening in significant amounts. Once they did, though, I was able to pick a lot – easily a few cups of berries in a quarter-hour's work. I ended up with so many that I didn't even use them all up making the pie, and will have to find some other use for them…

Thankfully, the pie came out well! I used the recipe I mentioned in my previous post (where I made it with raspberries and blueberries), and only added about a fourth of a cup of additional sugar. It wasn't an especially sweet pie, but it wasn't tart as I had feared the ʻākala would make it. (It's interesting to me how red the filling is – while related to blueberries, ʻōhelo are generally more red or reddish-purple in color.) I ended up making it after a particularly draining day at work (an arduous protocol that involved much tromping through the forest, under a sky that rained off-and-mostly-on all day) so I didn't get too fancy with the crust, but I did scratch the unofficial D20 logo into it. (It was also our last day doing that protocol this year, so it served as a nice celebration for finishing it.)

Anyway, just a quick post today as I'm technically still lodging at the hotel even though my place was cleared for re-entry this morning – the gas company won't come out to turn on the gas until Monday so I don't have any hot water or stove. I've got some interesting photos from visiting the annual Hakalau Natural Area Reserve open day last week, so look forward to those when I finally get a chance to catch my breath (hopefully this week!). A hui hou!

Checking out the new USGS building in Hilo, with drones!

There's a new building under construction on the UH Hilo campus (near to several places I have worked/am working), which when completed will house the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO) and the USGS Pacific Island Ecosystems Research Center (PIERC). It's replacing a previous HVO building which was located in Hawaiian Volcanoes National Park and was damaged in Kīlauea's 2018 eruption; this new one will be closer to staff who live in Hilo and students from the UH campus. Preparation of the lot started last year but construction really picked up this spring, and since I drive by it most days I've been able to watch its progress. And as a construction site not really near lots of people, I felt comfortable bringing out my Avata for some FPV exploration.

Along with my Mini 3 Pro; the video below contains footage from both. This was recorded on the 4th of July weekend, though I had to go back and reshoot the FPV footage on a different day because I was still figuring out which lens profiles worked with Gyroflow for post-production stabilization. (Note to self: It's the Wide profile that works, not Normal or [as you might think] Extra Wide). It's a slight shame since the weather was absolutely beautiful the first day, but the FPV footage I got the second time was better overall so it all works out.

I'm pretty happy with the resulting video. I couldn't really figure out a way to make a single long FPV shot look good, but I like the cutting between wide establishing shots and the more interesting individual fly-throughs. The music actually does stop like that halfway through (though I extended the pause slightly), and when I saw that collision in my footage I thought it was too funny not to sync them up. The recovery makes me smile, as I had basically nothing to do with it – the Avata can sometimes autonomously recover from collisions when you'd hardly expect it to.

It turns out I got that footage at pretty much the optimal point in the construction process as just the next week they started filling in the walls, making the main building less see-through and (probably) harder to fly through. I hope I get a chance to visit when it's complete, as they're going to have some amazing views of Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa, and the Saddle between them from that north lanai. We'll see how it goes! I don't know how much longer construction will take, but I'd imagine it'll finish sometime next year. A hui hou!

Tsunami (2025 edition)

Well, it's been a while since I last used the tsunami label on a post! Looking back I used it six times between 2010 and 2014, then…not until now. The first three years I lived in Hawaii each had a tsunami alert (two important enough to use the sirens), which primed to me think of them as roughly annual events. But then I haven't experienced one since 2014 (I don't think there were any while I was away in Australia), so when we started hearing tsunami watches (and then warnings) on the radio on Tuesday the 29th while working up at the Natural Area Reserve it was something of a blast from the past.

Thankfully, much like the others I've experienced living here, this one proved relatively uneventful. I've seen a reported wave height in Hilo of 4.9 feet, which was enough to flood some parking lots (and probably the first floors of some buildings) along the coast, but not enough to cause major damage. The wave was initially estimated to arrive just after 7 PM; it was still just light enough (right after sunset) that I put my drone in the air for about twenty minutes to see if I could see anything in the bay. The actual arrival happened around 8:30 PM, though, when it was far too dark to be see anything. (I also saw another drone in the air while I was up there, so I wasn't the only one with that idea.)

This was the largest tsunami alert since 2011, large enough that the sirens were activated – and since Friday was the first of the month, they also got activated for the usual first-of-the-month test, so I got to hear them twice in four days. Since I'm (decently far) out of the evacuation zone where I live it ended up being a relatively normal evening for me, but it's a good reminder that life's never boring when you live on a volcano in the middle of the Pacific! A hui hou!