Examples of Forests with Different Invasive Densities
Some Forests are obviously over-run by invasive species. Mark these as "High Invasive Density," and record an observations for each species you suspect is invasive:
Sometimes you find just a very small number of isolated non-native plants. Mark these as "Low Invasive Density," and record and observation for each species you suspect is invasive:
Forests where you don't detect invasive species may have a very open understory, but may also have a shrub layer thick with native shrubs and saplings. Mark these as "No Invasives," and record at least one observation of a native species.
Comments
One caution. In parts of eastern US White-tailed Deer over browsing causes a forest to have few understory shrubs. So it may look like the woods has few invasives, but it is not a healthy forest.
@lakekoshare , thank you for the comment. What you say is true, however, for this project, the goal is to ground-truth an analysis we did with LandSat imagery to detect invasive species presence based on seasonal NDVI. So, no, this doesn't reflect other forest processes, like successional stage, forest structure, herbivory (deer!), etc, but that is not the purpose of the project. But we are working towards future orthophoto based analyses to tackle some of these.
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