MICROTOPOGRAPHY

During a summer field ecology class I spent two weeks conducting a pilot study investigating the impacts of hiking disturbance on trails. Previous studies have found that plant cover is significantly sparser immediately adjacent to hiking trails, however, when hiking in Colorado, the opposite often seems to be true. When hiking through alpine ecosystems in the Rocky Mountains it often appears that clusters of wildflowers are denser and more vigorous immediately adjacent to the trail. I hypothesized that trail concavity led to increased water retention, benefiting trailside plants and leading to this seemingly counterintuitive observation. To investigate this I sampled trailside plants at multiple sites to compare the species richness, cover, and frequency of forbs at concave and well drained trail sites.