The day started at 8:30 A.M at the forestry center in the intern’s cabin. To start Christa gave us the remaining checks from yesterday’s activity about piecing together a solid hypothesis with only partial information. With the newly acquired information the interns attempted to form one final hypothesis. Once the hypotheses were collected, Christa explained that it was impossible to formulate the correct hypothesis because there is no story that can be proven with the given information. There was simply too little information to be absolutely certain of any one story. She later explained that the purpose of this experiment is to know that you will never have the whole story and will have to sometimes use simply your intuition and infer information from evidence to fill in the gaps.

            After the activity wrap up the students and Christa discussed chapter 6 in Paul Glaser’s “The Ecology of Patterned Boreal Peatland”. Students discussed the vegetation in our own peatland and discussed the possibility of how these plants could have affected the formation of the peatland. After lunch students held a successful meeting with SKC students as both parties discussed their own respective research, each arising their own questions to better understand each other’s projects. With the meeting wrapped up students then finished the day continuing to sieve samples for use in plant macrofossil analysis.

Wayne Greensky