Documenting Sucker Creek

A number of years ago, my State Office purchased a DSLR camera with a super wide-angle lens for taking pictures of the canopy.  To accompany the camera, they purchased some fancy software which can render one of these pictures of the canopy cover into binary (open/closed canopy).  This breakdown of the canopy is useful in determining effective shade and solar radiation reaching the stream channel at any given point.

Anyway, I was the lucky person who got the camera and the software and it was agreed that if any district needed photographs taken and analyzed, I'd be that person.  I used the camera and software when I worked down in Medford.  It was super useful in preparing an analysis of effects on two mining Plans of Operation.

As "luck" would have it, the first district that needed photos taken after I left for the Northwest Oregon District was the Medford District who needed photographs taken of a third mining Plan of Operation.  So I got permission to go, gathered up the equipment and enlisted the help of a fisheries biologist, and made one really long field day out of it.  I left Salem around 4 in the morning and got back around sunset.

It was a perfect field day: no smoke in the air, leaves were all greened-up, the temperature was warm, but there was a nice breeze, and our feet were in the creek all day.  Perfect!  I don't have any of the canopy cover pictures here, but these are the sites I chose: every 50 feet along the thalweg of the channel of Sucker Creek where it flows adjacent to the proposed mining site.