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Video Closed Captions

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Trenton Franz:
Hello, and welcome to the first day of camp.

Trenton Franz:
My name is Trenton Franz. I am a third-year graduate student

Trenton Franz:
in civil and environmental engineering.

Trenton Franz:
And today is the first real day of camp where we start to go out and do

Trenton Franz:
some work. Yesterday we arrived and I set up

Trenton Franz:
our camps, tents as you see here. Out here you see another way of

Trenton Franz:
getting water. We have our roof system here

Trenton Franz:
flowing down into our gutter system, and a large tank that collects the

Trenton Franz:
water for later use. And this is our beautiful camp,

Trenton Franz:
the river camp, as you see here.

Trenton Franz:
We see a nice fig in the background and the river which we're located along.

Trenton Franz:
I'd like to introduce you to another camp member, Dr. Elizabeth King. She is the post-doc on our project

Trenton Franz:
and is quite knowledgeable and a very valuable asset to the project, I must say.

Trenton Franz:
So what are we doing today, Dr. King?

Elizabeth "Lizzie" King:
Today, we're heading up to Koija Group Ranch, which is our main field study site.

Elizabeth "Lizzie" King:
This is an area that is communally owned by the local Maasai people.

Elizabeth "Lizzie" King:
So, in the area there is an abundance of livestock,

Elizabeth "Lizzie" King:
human settlements, and mixed with wildlife.

Elizabeth "Lizzie" King:
And the work that we're looking at is looking at the balance between

Elizabeth "Lizzie" King:
different plant species that are affected,

Elizabeth "Lizzie" King:
both by the amount of rainfall the area gets and the amount of

Elizabeth "Lizzie" King:
herbivory pressure that the area gets,

Elizabeth "Lizzie" King:
and trying to understand the balance between the plant species there

Elizabeth "Lizzie" King:
and the water availability in the soil.

Elizabeth "Lizzie" King:
So, we have a sampling protocol to start understanding how different

Elizabeth "Lizzie" King:
plants are competing for water, how different plants affect water

Elizabeth "Lizzie" King:
and filtration, and we're going to be on our knees

Elizabeth "Lizzie" King:
with trowels digging a lot today.

Trenton Franz:
That sounds like a fun day ahead of us.

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Trenton Franz:
We're installing probes here. Here's our bare soil patch and our

Trenton Franz:
nice, friendly trench diggers. Appreciate all their hard work.

Trenton Franz:
And we have the data logger and the cooler along with the battery for power

Trenton Franz:
and the grass patch, which you see there, and lastly the two sansevieria [intermedia] holes.

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