This is a plot out in the Great Basin Desert at Dugway Proving Ground, the first military base in which we conducted field tests. Dugway Proving Ground has a great reputation. They test nerve gases and chemical weapons there. When I say I'm going to Dugway, a lot of people are so sorry for me. But I love going there. I work in the areas where they don't test that kind of stuff and so it's actually pretty nice. They don't have any cows at Dugway Proving Ground. You don't have to worry about kids going through the site pulling up your stakes. It's protected in many senses. So it was a great place to do some of my work. This is on the road between where the people live and the road where they have the guard that says you can't go past here without some sort of permit because the army does some nasty things out in that part of the desert. Everybody ignores the part of the base where we have our study plots, so it really is a protected site in which I can do my work.

I want to talk a little about this. This is a Great Basin site. You can see a lot of shrubs here such as gray molly, sagebrush, greasewood, and a number of other shrub species. The model of how we set up this field site is essentially the model we followed in subsequent studies. I'll tell you what we did here and then you can assume we did the same sort of thing at the other sites. We set up 108 permanent plots, indicated by the stakes. These are our plots. The quadrats that we would put on these were 1.0 m² and so we had meter square plots which would receive different treatments. First, we divided the area into two different sets of plots. One set of plots was dedicated for enumeration studies. We would go out and sample the soil and see how many algae and lichens and mosses were in it. The second set of plots was for sedimentation studies.

Second, we had three disturbance treatments. We had undisturbed plots. We had a trampling disturbance where we went out in big thick boots and jumped on it, kicked it, stomped on it, and tried to disrupt the crust. Then we had a burning treatment where we brought out a large barrel with propane jets and introduced fire. This way you could burn a small area without setting the whole desert on fire.

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