Wesley Weatherley is the teenage grandson of Wanda Weatherley, heading off in Fall 2007 to college at the prestigious University of Utah. He grew up around Oakley, Utah, where he enjoyed the 4th of July Rodeo held every year. This past summer he really upset his mother by telling her that he wanted some excitement in his life, so he was going to visit “Bagdad” before heading off to college. Well, his mother was extremely upset and “spitting bullets”, even though she is a staunch Republican. Then, after a few hours, she realized her son was talking about “Bagdad” and not “Baghdad”. Needless to say, Wesley was rather busy in August visiting all of the locations named “Bagdad” in the USA. In fact, he found 10 different locations across the USA (he used this new fangled map program from GOOGLE). At each location, Wesley did several things: (a) collected leaves from the dominant vegetation and (b) described the vegetation at each location. At night in his hotel room, Wesley logged onto the Internet and visited the famous plant ecologist Helmut Leith’s website. He is the scientist who described so many climate diagrams. The climate diagrams of some of the sites visited by Wesley in summer 2007 are shown on page 302. One of these climate diagrams is the climate diagram for Baghdad, Iraq, which is a city that Wesley did not visit. When he returned to Wanship a few weeks ago, he left me these data and told me he would get back to analyzing them during the Fall Semester break. I couldn’t wait for him and so I went and worked out his travels myself. My, my, my, did he ever put on the miles! That boy sure did see some interesting vegetation; I can’t wait for the slide show.

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