Today was the start of the brand new wood-ant season 2010. Last two years the fieldwork was already improved a lot. When documenting a nest observation the GPS coordinates are added to the observation-sheet. Another big improvement is taking photo’s from each nest. Today we went to the Zaarderheiken-site to check out some nests. At first, we had to take the GPS coordinates and nest dimentions for each nest. But our goal was to test the new piquets in several ways.

The first test was placing four piquets around a nest with scale markings. These piquets are vissible on the photo’s and  make it possible to read the nests dimentions from the photo later. The second test was using them during the exploration of a new site. We marked all the nests we discovered. Once finished we had a clear overview from a central position. The third test was marking a fictional ant road (because in winter there are no ant-roads). The piquets were placed on this fictional trail between three nests. This method will be used later this year when several super-colonies will be mapped.

You can read more about the fieldwork here: camera, GPS , piquets and data integrity