Experience is not gained over night

It’s a narration of what I have experienced as a team leader for the first time after joining the civil service…..

Being only forestry researcher at Renewal Natural Resources –Research and Development Centre (RNR-RDC) Wengkhar, I am entrusted with pivotal responsibility to lead any research activities under our jurisdiction. Any RNR related research in Eastern region is mandatory to be led by our organisation despite five regional Research and Development centres in Bhutan.

After joining Wengkhar, for first several weeks I spent my office hours on rummaging the old files beautifully kept in a wooden bookshelf erected left side of the door leading to my revolving chair and an Acer desktop in front of it. Sitting and referring old documents and research activities done by my predecessors wasn’t of much problem to me as it just involved of little bit of understanding and note-taking for my own benefit to run  this office in capacity of new researcher. 

Although formally I joined office on 13^th February, 2013, I was lucky enough to be nominated for GIS and RS training jointly organised by CoRRB and ICIMOD at Thimphu for two weeks. Training was more or less like a spoon feeding program by the resource person, even then at least trainees were made familiar with the software. Back at my office I tried my best to explore and work with the particular software but I was hardly able to get in to it. Particular moment vividly depict that how ineffective the training was for me and made me feel how inefficient I was despite of ten days training. It made me feel low about myself and consulted the GIS focal person of our office. But to my surprise he brought hope on me by sharing challenges one must encounter in exploring GIS software for first hand user and advising me to keep on exploring using local data with his helping hand whenever I am in need of it. March month passed away attending training, reviewing and preparing work plan for the fiscal year 2012 to 2013.

On month of April, I was deputed to carry out the study on species composition of the Ompo-ri community forest located at Deothang, Samdrupjongkhar. Although I have participated in such filed data collection work for several times prior to joining this research centre as an active team member. But this time it was my responsibility to lead the team rather than usual practice of following others. Before going for actual filed work, I made myself equipped by referring several scientific paper published online to formulate the methodology for upcoming field work. And anticipated it shouldn’t be of much problem to execute in field because I thought it is just a matter of knowing how to operate the devices in a field with identification of several species within a plot.

After reaching at research site and detail site inspection, I was bit confused in site selection to layout transect because the area was totally different than what I have anticipated as it comprised of several hillocks of southern foothill. Regardless of confusion, somehow I managed to select the hill that has a highest variation on altitudinal gradient with different aspect to represent the entire area.

Next day a team comprising of geog forest extension officer, representatives from community forest management group (CFMG) was following my instruction on how to carry out the field work. Everything was up to expectation until we finished laying out of our first plot using metre tapes, compass, clino-meter and GPS, etc. Research site comprised of broadleaf of subtropical forest with very rich plant diversity. We started with measuring of Height and DBH of the trees that are within the plot by shooting Hipso-meter to the Transponder placed at the breast height of the targeted tree for calculating height and using dia-meter tape for DBH. These two measurements using high tech instruments were to fill up second and third columns of data collection form and the most important was to fill up the first column which included the name of species. By the virtue of the vegetation type, trees were very tall with clean boles, majestically erected towards the open sky competing for sunlight. It was almost near to impossible to identify and collect sample specimens for further identification by the expertise from such trees and I was almost at verge of losing the hope. But I was fortunate to have 74 years old and a middle age man from the locality who was CFMG member in my team. So as a team me and geog forest extension officer manage to do all recording and device using part. Whereby an old man identified species for us with local name and a middle age man collected samples for us by using his climbing tactics. Then we made the herbarium of those collected samples using a herbarium press that was carried with us. Although identification of undergrowth were not as challenging as that of trees but collecting of samples was much easier.

After a tedious day work inside the forest in spite of very little energy left in me, at the evening back at my halting place I spent for three to four hours digitizing the collected samples under the brightness of the electric bulb.  When it’s time to go to bed, I used to be fully exhausted both physically and mentally hardly willing to eat anything. 

Data collection in a field

This is the moment when I have realised that experience is never gained over night and pursuing college and gaining degree with first rank is not the end of learning, in fact it’s just the stepping stone towards exploring real knowledge. And I am thankful to those local people and fellow mates for making this work a successful despite  several challenges.