samanthawajda's Journal

It was very cloudy and was raining lightly my entire walk. I found this nature walk to be much easier than the fungi walk. When looking for fungi, I had a lot of difficulty finding it in my walk. But, in contrast, when looking for the different types of plants, I found them all almost immediately without looking very hard. This assignment showed me that there is a lot more diversity in the plant phylum than we often remember and it also reminded me how prevalent these different species are all around us at all times. It can be so easy to forget all of the millions of species that surround us on a daily basis. I often forget with plants too how much diversity there actually is. Often when I think of plants I think of flowers but i was reminded on this walk that all of the moss that lines a lot of the trees and ground are all plants too! It's easy to forget all of the diversity and uniques characteristics and differences that exist between species when you aren't looking for them.

It was very overcast and rainy for my walk and was colder than it has been usually. This made the walk not as enjoyable due to the light rain that persisted. I went to the trails along the Chestnut Hill reservoir and was looking primarily for mushrooms in trees of on the ground as my types of fungi. Honestly, while I am sure there are an endless amount of fungi species all around me, I found these fungi hard to find. There were numerous plants and animals but fungi was not as apparent as I had expected. I also realized how particularly difficult it is to distinguish fungi. I saw a lot of moss on trees and at first thought this may be fungi before realizing it is just a plant. I was unsure if a lot of the spots I observed on different trees were also plants, like moss, or if they were in fact fungi. This is where more knowledge about the characteristics of fungi that we will learn in class will help me to better identify what is and what isn't fungi. Overall, I thought this walk was very interesting because I have never gone in a walk with the intent of looking for specifically fungi. For me, it seemed that, ironically, because I was looking, it was even harder to find.

For this nature walk, I walked to the chestnut hill reservoir. It was a very cloudy and rainy day and was slightly drizzling the entire walk. I was surprised by the amount of vegetation along the reservoir. There were a lot of ferns and small flowers. I also was surprised to see a lot of fungi on the trees surrounding the reservoir. I did not think that I would be photographing fungi, I had assumed I would be observing many types of plants and trees. There were also more birds than I expected. While they were hard to photograph, I heard a lot of different bird noises from within the trees. Overall, there was much more biodiversity than I expected from the area. When you aren’t looking for such diversity, it can be so easy to forget how much there really is. Yet, it was clear that there were dominating species within the area. There was a fern-like plant that I observed that basically covered the entire reservoir. It was clear that this was a dominating species for the area and this would affect the species evenness if you were to evaluate the diversity of this particular area. So, while there was much more diversity than I expected with thousands of plants, animals, and bacteria working together, there is also obvious predominance of certain species over others.