samanthawajda's Journal

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.