Vegetation Sampling Day 1

This past Saturday me and the two other students in my group went out to the site where we will be performing vegetation transects. We went there with the goal of performing transects that were 16m long with 5, 1m square quadrants in which we would estimate the % coverage, stem count, and canopy height for each species in the plot. however we worked with Jason one of the volunteers at the NERR and he showed us a way to sample these transects using a camera and a computer program to obtain the same results. because we have to work at low tide the amount of sampling we can do is time constrained and with this method of sampling we can gather the data from the transects much faster then doing it by hand and the data can then be brought back to the lab and analysed. this allows for the sampling to be done much faster and effectively. Because of this we decided to switch to this method. So what we ended up doing this Saturday was to measure three transects using both methods and so we can later compare the data to see if one method is more accurate then the other and how different the methods results really are. 
some of my class makes working on collecting the data for one of their quadrants.