What to say about week three. I suppose I’ll start at the beginning. Monday was the fourth of July and we had a delicious picnic on campus with all the interns and UO students and some of the mentors and professors. I ate a few of the freshest oysters I’ve ever had given that they were harvested from the ocean across the street (have I mentioned how much I love having an ocean across the street?) and played some friendly volleyball with the other interns. I only hit the ball into the creek once and it was hot enough that it dried almost instantly. The rest of the afternoon I spent swimming with Ytxzae and hanging out on the jetty with Flynn and it was all very pleasant and relaxing. I spent most of the work week prodding at my methodology and praying there were no design flaws. Some of the details I mulled over were: how the depth of the diver’s position affects the size of the scale, if pulling stills every fifteen seconds provides enough data to resist the skew of outliers, and how to ensure I’m only counting kelp within the approximated rectangle of the diver’s course. First, I decided to write-off the depth of the footage off-bottom as a random effect of my model because I’m only going for a flat-bottom estimate, meaning the survey is 2-D. The height of the diver's vantage point should not matter because the size of the laser scale adjusts proportional to its distance from the sea floor. Second, I’ve decided to calculate the width means and standard deviations for the original ten stills AND for an expanded data set of twenty stills per video, in order to compare the values and assess both precision (the similarity of the values to each other) and accuracy (the difference between the experimental widths and the actual width of the transect). Precise values would look like: 1.2, 1.3, 1.2, 1.1, 1.2, while an accurate value would be 1.2 if the true width of the transect was also 1.2. And finally, since I am manually collecting still images I have some agency in where/when I take a screenshot. I’ve decided that I’ll only capture a still when the diver is looking straight ahead and not at a random point off to the side, to prevent collecting a width that does not fall within the sample boundary. I just took a very long and deep breath after typing all of that out, please feel free to take a deep breath with me as you have just read everything I typed out. Many thanks.
Well, I’ve embarked on some revisions to my project so I think I’ll spend the next week doing a little more cleanup and hopefully start sharing some results!
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AuthorHello! My name is Catalina, welcome to my blog! I am a rising Junior at NYU pursuing a degree in Biology and I'm from Sunnyvale, California. This summer I am working in Dr. Aaron Galloway's Coastal Trophic Ecology (CTE) lab developing video survey methodology applied to kelp forest monitoring. Thanks for reading! Archives
August 2022
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