First interview From the 7th - 9th of November I made my first data-collection trip to the field. Since my last trip (end of Sept), I've been working with Siddappa Setty at ATREE to finalize a research plan that allows me to work in a site (MM Hills) 6 hours from home but still get to see my family (for awhile there I was thinking either no research, or take the kids out of school, or only see my family a few days a week). We've come up with a survey-based study to look at agricultural crops, trees, and use of forest for livestock and food items. I will come and go from MM Hills but the majority of the interviews will be conducted by Nagendra who is from BRT and has worked extensively with ATREE. Although I'd really like to be actually taking all the data myself, this seems like a good compromise between family and research and I think it will all turn out well. The 3 days at MM Hills went really well. We will be interviewing in 9 villages and we were able to do initial interviews in four of the nine while there and visit ten villages total. One of the villages turned out to be pretty far from the mountain range and so Nagendra will check out an extra village that we weren't able to visit during our time there. The villages were very interesting. We're working at 3 elevations and there were pretty notable differences between the agricultural set ups at each elevation. In all cases, the forest is used heavily, especially for harvesting non-timber forest products (NTFPs) and for grazing cattle. It makes sense since humans and bovines have been using these forests for centuries here, but it was still surprising to me since I am so used to forests being cleared for cattle. I imagine there are so many native mega-herbivores here that the impact from cattle grazing is withing the disturbance regime these forests evolved with. Tim and I are planning a visit out to one of the cattle camps during December when the boys are both on school field trips. I'm pretty sure Siddappa will also join us.
2 Comments
Shan
11/20/2012 10:54:31
cool that you are able to get data, and keep the kids in school:)
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pam
11/20/2012 15:06:03
Yeah, it was a bit depressing when I wasn't sure how I'd pull it off but I'm stoked now.
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