Orienteering in Jamaica

The final field exercise, where participants ground-truthed a route created by one of their colleagues, may have provided the most-instructive field lesson. Until this exercise, participants had come to expect high precision in the bearings and distances they encountered in the field. This was based on the routes provided by the instructors, all of which had been ground-truthed twice and paced with 100-rn measuring tapes. This final exercise made salient that the maps will not always align perfectly with ground features and that they need to be constantly evaluating conditions, adjusting their compasses and distances when appropriate, and recording all information in their notebooks when they are in the field.

13. FINAL EVALUATIONS OF PARTICIPANTS

Of the ten participants, two passed with distinction, seven passed successfully, and one failed to pass. Annex 2 is provided to each organization with a review of their personnel.

13.1. Accurate recording of field data: participants varied in their abilities to maintain a proper field notebook. One of the weakest components for all but two of the participants was their forgetting to include surname, the year, page number, and site locality at the top of each page. Participants were lectured on the importance of this information, most notably for if/when the binding of a notebook breaks and the pages fall out. This information also facilitates locating specific data in the text when notebooks are examined at a future date by other researchers or interested persons. A review of notebooks by S. Koenig mid-way through the course enabled participants to improve their note-keeping skills.

Participants also varied in the amount of descriptive detail they included, particularly during the field practical examinations. In general, the older, more experienced participants kept more- detailed notes about environmental conditions (e.g., plant species, land-use patterns, weather). The best note-keepers commented that they had been advised in other courses to record as much information as possible because they could never predict when conditions might change. The advice given by S. Koenig in this workshop was that they should write their notebooks for someone reading the information in 100 years. All participants were given a copy of a page in a notebook from a researcher who stayed in Windsor in 1920 to highlight the value of historical information.

13.2. Use of orienteering compass: all participants quickly mastered the skill of (1) sighting a compass to a distant feature and determining their bearing; (2) after being given a bearing, orienting the compass and themselves to said bearing; and (3) pacing a line for a given bearing. All participants also mastered the ability to align a map to magnetic north using the meridian lines on the compass.