Transect walks are a common method in conservation biology (Walpole and Sheldon 1999) and are used in participatory rural appraisal methods to uncover local information across landscapes (Chambers 1994). Transect walks involve walking in a straight line for a pre-defined distance, recording geographic coordinates every fifty meters or so, and writing down the kinds of environmental features around that point.(source)

The first few weeks of any project involve processes of listening, observing and thinking through – and even more with a site like this that can only be interrogated through experience. Obviously open experimentation is valuable as part of this.

Transect walking is something that I’d done with scientists before on other projects before – and was something that we’d done during the survey of plants during the winter before this project began (see list below this post) – walking over a few 100 metres – with posts set in the ground for surveying every  50 meters?

It struck me that I could so something similar with a cable mounted camera – in order to record vegetation along the entire line rather than at set markers : Sure there would be camera blur – but maybe a time-lapse process taking stills would work better – these were my first experiments..

This method used time-lapse: NB need to debug the start stop nature of the unit – but the capture of sunset – And sharper images per frame are handy – esp. for cataloguing/identification purposes

Side views – offer capacity to experiment with other focal planes along continuous transect

Passive Plot, Species Map 1/7/23

The following species map was gathered by David Tucker and Gabrielle Lebbink on 17/7/23. NB this was a dry season assessment – and further species were evident after rains by Feb 2024.