Veg Plots Revisited and Leaf Layer Cake

August 1966 student paper by Charles E. Olmsted in Botany 348 class with Elroy Rice describes vegetation and soil data from two approx. one acre plots set up along the western border of Oliver's Woods. I have found thin (1/8"-1/4") rebar stakes along two parallel lines that look to be the location of the North plot 145 yds by 33.5 yds. The two east west running lines are 100 ft apart. They should run 435.6 feet. It is not clear where they begin on the western end: at the fence line of Chautauqua (as Olmsted states) a few feet further west along the earlier fence line.. or some feet east into the sedges. The SW corner looks like it could have been a now-half empty green ash.. left open as a low hollow stump with live trunk above it.
Olmsted reports all the trees greater than 4 inch DBH.
I would like to mark the boundary of the two plots and do a before and after 44-45 year snap shot of the changes. Have as exercise for Ecology lab? publish in POAS?
Olmsted's discussion lists 234 juniper seedlings (>6 inches tall) along the western edge of the southern plot. Today there are many good sized junipers there; but almost all are dead, over topped by oak, elm, hackberry or pecan. Olmsted also mentions the common grass in the south plot Leersia virginica. It barely occurs in the forest there now.
In the north plot in 1966 there were 101 green ash greater than 4 inches DBH, six persimmon, one cottonwood and one elm. Today the near west end of the plot is choked with ~30-40 yr old green ash 2-3 in DBH. They are likely most all regeneration from the years after 1961 when cattle were removed. Half are dead standing from periods of high water table.

Coming in the SW entrance the trail is filled with dry new fallen oak leaves. Beneath these are the earlier fallen leaves of hackberry and elm. The different species, ash, elm, oak, persimmon, hackberry each year drop their leaves in the same sequence and deposit a leaf layer cake with oak on the top. Interesting to contemplate the consequence of the phenology being reliably translated into a spatially repeating sequence of species layers in the leaf litter.. with the arrangement varying place to place depending on species near by.