This was the final week of the internship. Since I had all of my work done already, it was a very laid back week for me, which was welcome and appreciated.
I tagged along on some field work a few times this week. On Monday, Ali and I hiked out to a NOAA climate data collection station to troubleshoot electrical issues. On Wednesday I went out to help conduct elevation surveys at Danger Point. I got stuck in the mudflat again and had to use both hands to dig each leg out. I still find that to be enjoyable. I went out at high tide on Thursday with Adam and Will to replace the NOAA sonde probes around the South Slough estuary. That was a great way to see the estuary for the last time during my internship. I also put the final edits on my poster and sent it in to be printed. It looks great! I’m really proud of it. On Friday, we had the REU poster symposium behind the dining hall. A good number of people turned out, including OIMB students and professors, both active and retired. I felt really good explaining my research and answering questions about it. It was a great way to share the work I’ve done in a format that’s much more comfortable to me than a presentation. It was a great way to wrap up the internship. I’m home in Portland now as I write this. I’ve been reflecting on my summer and just how grateful I am to have been given the opportunity to do this. I feel so enriched by my time at OIMB and South Slough. The summer has only validated and deepened my aspirations to work in research and restoration. I have already been asked to help researchers at Portland State with their field work, largely because I have the experience from the REU that I do. I feel more hopeful and excited than ever about my future.
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This week was spent at my desk.
Ali and I worked together to organize my data and create graphs. There were a couple of 11+ hour days at work doing that and designing my poster. I'm proud of how all of it has come together to create this final product. I was happy to hear from Ali that my research will be referenced in more of South Slough's work, particularly surrounding eelgrass restoration. Having my work be applied to future projects adds a lot of meaning for me. I also sent an abstract for my work to a science conference called American Geophysical Union. If I'm accepted, I'll present my poster at the conference in New Orleans in December. I said my final see ya later's to the NOAA interns. Now that they're gone I'm feeling more ready to leave in a week. It'll be nice to get back to "real life." I'm grateful that I have until September 27 for school to start. This summer has been busy and a lot of fun, but I'm ready for a break. It's a weird feeling to look around on campus or at places in town and remember that I'm looking at these for one of the last times. This summer has been very impactful on me personally and hopefully professionally. I'll remember Coos Bay and Charleston fondly. This week I'll be finalizing and printing my poster. On Friday I'll present to the OIMB community as part of a poster symposium for the REU's. It should be pretty fun to explain my work and try to answer people's questions. No weekend trip this week. Just some really solid Coos Bay hangs with my South Slough friends.
I've turned down some field work this week to focus on my own research project. I've officially finished collecting and entering data and have begun looking closely at my data and making graphs to try to understand my results. I have a lot left to do on the first draft of the poster which is due on Tuesday. The NOAA interns (Petra, Anna, and Emma) will leave for home on August 6, so on Wednesday night the staff at South Slough hosted and provided food for an intern celebration potluck at Sunset Bay. It was a really nice time to get to know more about some of the people I haven't gotten many chances to work with. After everyone had gotten a chance to eat, we all gathered in a big circle. All the interns were presented with a "Certificate of Appreciation" that was personalized with a new title relating to our work. For me, it was "Eelgrass Sediment Specialist." The mentors shared some kind words about their interns and a few of them emphasized how great of a group we are (the best group?). Not surprising. They were inspired by how supportive, inclusive, and collaborative we are with each other. That was encouraging to hear and it completely reflects my experience with the other interns. The interns and volunteers were prompted to share the best and worst experiences in the field this summer. It was fun to hear everybody tell their tales of misery and adventure. I noticed that many of the best experiences revolved more around the people they were with and the conversations they had than the actual field work. I certainly have felt that way. The work itself is really interesting and exciting, but the people I've gotten to work with are really what make it feel so special. Before I started this REU program I skimmed through some of the blogs of past interns and read posts that were dripping with sentimentality about their time here and how sad it was that their internship must come to an end. I told myself I wouldn't write like that and to an extent I thought I would be invulnerable to feeling those kinds of feelings. But as you can tell from every post since week three, that just isn't the case. I've become attached to the South Slough interns and staff. I'm so grateful for my time here and specifically for the people who I've shared so much with. It's a rare thing for me to grow close to new people in such a short period of time. I think a big driver of that was necessity. In the backs of our minds we knew that there was a looming expiration date on our internships, so we had to get comfortable with each other fast. But I think more than that it was the kindness and generosity and sincere goodness that has facilitated that closeness. They truly are special people. I've tried to focus on how grateful I feel to have met them, rather than fixating on the sense of "loss" that comes with going our separate ways. But it doesn't really work. I will miss them so much. This week's top source of excitement was the weekend trip to Mount Hood.
Emma and I drove to Portland on Thursday after work. She dropped me off at my apartment and then picked up her boyfriend Max from the airport. It was really comforting to be home for a night. I loved holding my cats and seeing all of my stuff and being in such a familiar setting with Allison. It also felt strange to be a visitor living out of backpacks in my own home. The next afternoon, Allison and I shopped for camping food before making our way to our campsite outside of a little town called Rhododendron. We had a dinner of snacks and good wine. We took a short walk and found Lost Creek. We stood there for a while and looked at the downed trees that were sprawled several feet above the water, reaching from bank to bank. We imagined how the insects, amphibians, birds, and mammals might use these logs to make their lives a little better. She remarked about how empathy can be used in environmental sciences -- to imagine what it would be like to live as another kind of organism, and what you would need to live and minimize suffering in that form. We walked back to camp and went to bed shortly after sunset. Big day ahead. Allison and I woke up at 6 am, guzzled cold brew, and headed to the trailhead to meet our friends. Emma, Max, Petra, and Camilo arrived a few minutes later. Several members of the group had not met before that morning, so brief introductions were exchanged and we got to work preparing our lunches for the hike. We began the trail a little after 8. It was fun hiking with people I don't know very well, particularly Camilo and Max. When we were able to steady our breathing, conversation flowed well. I enjoyed asking questions about their unique experiences and getting to know a little bit about what it's like to grow up in Brooklyn or Chicago or to travel all over the world as a child. Allison and I picked a hike that we had done the two summers prior. It's a trail filled with almost everything I love in a hike: wildflowers, canopy cover, diverse scenery, and far out views from above the tree line. It was harder than I remembered. We took a wrong turn late in the hike and ended up adding a little extra distance and a lot of elevation gain. It was challenging, but we made it to the end of the trail where we found comfy enough spots to sit and eat our lunches. The view was incredible. The next morning everyone gathered around the picnic table to drink their coffee while I cooked a breakfast hash. Max meticulously laid out a buffet of all the food we had left over, complete with a charcuterie plate of crackers, deli meats, and cheeses. It was a great trip all around. It's fulfilling to show my friends places that are special to me and to hear them reflect on how content and happy they feel. ------ I spent the week at work processing samples and collecting data. I'm happy with the progress I've made and I'm feeling good about the amount of time I have left to finish my project. On Wednesday, I ran 18 samples through the sediment shaker to analyze grain size distributions. I was intensely focused and efficient, which allowed me to more than double my personal record for samples shaken in a day. I was quite happy with myself. On Thursday, Petra and I were in the lab working on our separate projects. I introduced her to bluegrass music, which happens to be ideal for working with dirt. There are two pictures in the slideshow above of Petra and Will doing some bluegrass jigs. Will is a bluegrass expert (he plays the banjo), so he knows what he's doing. On Friday, Anna and I went with Ali and Ian to do some seining of eelgrass beds for a researcher at a university in Canada. The conditions weren't right for what we needed to do, so the field work basically amounted to a boat ride to a couple of sites in the Coos Estuary on a gorgeous morning. I was glad to be a part of that. A little while after returning from seining, Jordan and I joined Anna to help her do a forest plot survey for her research project on assessing wildfire risk in the South Slough reserve. I enjoyed asking her questions and having her teach me about what she's learned so far from her research. The three of us then took a long hike out to Long Island Point, just to see it. The hike was really cool. I'm not sure how long it was, but I'd estimate five miles out and back. It ends at the point of a peninsula, high on a cliff overlooking a beautiful expanse of the estuary. On the way back we stopped at a research plot and guessed about the ages of some of the trees before taking cores, counting the rings, and learning their actual ages. The work I did this week was more focused on my own research than most of the previous weeks in which I would often help the other interns with their field work.
On Monday, Ali and I were joined by Keary Howley (SSNERR GIS Specialist) and three interns to conduct eelgrass surveys and collect sediment samples on Valino Island at low tide. It was rough. The boat got stuck in the sand when we arrived, so it took a great effort from five of us to rock, turn, push, and pull the boat off the sandbar and back into the water. The scene must have been pretty entertaining for Anna, who was standing a short distance away apparently keeping watch for pirates. The conditions were unkind. The air was cold and damp and the wind could not be ignored. It was common to witness somebody frantically chasing plastic bags or our supply bins that were being carried off by the wind. Ali and I took the boat to Clam Island, Barview, and Valino Island on Tuesday to collect samples and eelgrass data. It was a nicer day than Monday, but again the wind was harsh. The bay and the Slough were gorgeous when the sun came out. Wednesday was easily the best day I had this week. Ali and I parked at Hinch bridge, high in the estuary. We put our waders and boots on and took a ~45 minute hike through forests and marshes to reach our final sampling site for my research. Danger Point is a mudflat that was given its name when a volunteer sank into the mud and became quite stuck. Fortunately this person was extricated before the tide came in. As I trudged across the mudflat, Ali told me a story of a man from Washington who was conducting research alone on a mudflat at low tide. He found himself stuck and he must have been there for hours, desperately trying to free himself. He was tragically unsuccessful. As the tide moved in, water filled the estuary and the sea gradually rose to his shoulders and then to his eyes and then up over his head. Thursday was spent on two separate tasks. I placed sediment samples from Clam Island into the muffle oven for my loss on ignition (LOI) analysis in order to calculate the percentage of organic matter in the samples. I also ran half of my samples from Clam Island through the sediment shaker, which is a pretty time-intensive process. I also worked on a secondary project for Anna. On Tuesday, Anna kindly collected a tree core during her field work in which she and her mentor conducted a forest plot survey. I had asked for a tree core a few weeks prior, so it was thoughtful of her to remember and collect one for me. It was interesting for me to have a “souvenir” from her research, so I thought it could be nice for her to receive a token from my own research environment. On Saturday, four of us South Slough interns drove to Willamette National Forest to camp. It was very hot when we arrived, so we were eager to swim in the chilly Cougar Reservoir after we set up camp. Once the oppressive heat of the day had mostly subsided, we visited the nearby hot spring. It was gorgeous there and we met some interesting people, but unfortunately the water was quite hot.
When we got back to camp we changed into comfy clothes and huddled around a jug of water that I illuminated with a bicycle headlight. We cooked s’mores over a propane stove and had thoughtful conversations, like an unexpectedly heated debate about whether or not Fruit by the Foot is a candy, which it obviously isn’t. We took Sunday morning pretty slow (shown above). Emma made banana pancakes. After we broke camp, we drove an hour east to hike Iron Mountain. The trail was gorgeous. A gallery of wildflowers in full bloom: yarrow, red columbines, lupines, Indian paintbrush and Oregon sunshine. Grand, sweeping views of the Three Sisters, Jefferson, Diamond Peak, and Mount Hood to the north. We talked about the education system, commitment, and all the sports we’ve quit. There was cell service at the peak. I sent Allison (pictured) a photo of Mount Hood, which is prominently visible from Portland. Allison had the day off, so she drove two and a half hours south to join us in Eugene for dinner and drinks and a slow walk in the neighborhood. It was fun for me to have her meet my new friends, and to introduce them to such an important piece of my life. The drive back to Coos Bay was dark and stunning. Forests of silhouettes and moonlit rivers lent themselves well to reflective discussion. We arrived home late that night, tired and grateful. --- The "Yes, I do actually work here" segment: I had Monday off, so I worked on a project proposal from home for most of the day. Tuesday was spent revising both the proposal and a ten-minute presentation I had to give that afternoon. The presentation was a bit of a bumpy ride, but I made it to the other side. On Wednesday I did the interniest field work of the summer. For several hours, I babysat some expensive GPS equipment that South Slough set up at the US Coast Guard station down the road from OIMB. I asked one of the scientists what I should do if the Coast Guard gives me any trouble, and whether I technically outrank them. I don't. I went with Petra to Anderson Marsh that afternoon to help her collect soil cores. There was a time when we thought the pickup was stuck and/or broken, but we figured it out. I was exceptionally productive on Thursday. Sediment was shaken and data was crunched. On Friday, Ali and I hiked down to the world's muddiest mudflat to collect sediment cores for my research. It was like walking across a football field of waste-deep chocolate mousse that smells bad and has crabs in it. But when you can't walk, you crawl. And when you can't crawl, you use your hands to excavate your legs and pray the tide doesn't get to you before you make it to solid ground. It was a great time! I always appreciate working closely with Ali. It's nice to have the opportunity to get to know each other better. This week has been busy with field work, which is just how I like it. On Monday I helped take elevation surveys at a site in South Slough during low tide. The scientists at the reserve collect that data at fixed intervals throughout the year to track how the elevation of the estuary floor changes over time as a result of sedimentation and erosion processes.
On Tuesday, Petra and I joined Dr. Molly Keough (University of Oregon) to collect sediment at three sites around Coos Bay. Molly was a treat to work with. We asked her some big questions about her research, her academic career, and her life more broadly. Molly was so thoughtful and generous with her answers and it was inspiring to see the joy on her face as she talked about the personal fulfillment she finds in her work. Wednesday was spent processing sediment samples in the lab. Ali and I worked with the sediment shaker and refined our methods for analyzing the distribution of grain sizes within my samples. It was satisfying to see the grains separated and organized into such uniform sizes. I found a magnifying glass to look closer at the individual grains. I guessed about what types of rock they came from and imagined the routes they traveled through space and time to ultimately find themselves sitting before me. Six scientists and interns from South Slough joined forces to count an endangered species of lily on Thursday. The western bog lily (Lilium occidentale) is a visually striking forb (shown in the slideshow above) that only grows in blacklock soils within four miles of the west coast between Coos County, Oregon and Humboldt County, California. The western lily gained protected status under the Endangered Species Act after nearly being driven to extinction, primarily as a result of changes in land use. On Friday, Jordan, Petra, Anna, and I went to Tom's Creek salt marsh to collect sediment cores for Petra's research. It took us about three hours to collect the samples from the site. Then we had a nice little picnic together in the bed of the pickup (see slideshow). Later in the afternoon, Anna and I went to Bastendorf beach to do nurdle patrol, which is a really fun thing to say. We didn't find any nurdles. It was a really great week. It's been two weeks since the internship started. I've really loved my time here. I feel genuinely welcomed and supported by the people at the South Slough Reserve and OIMB.
I'm being mentored by Ali Helms, South Slough’s Estuarine Monitoring Coordinator. She’s brilliant and so experienced, but I also benefit from her patience and encouragement. I’m lucky to be working with her. I've begun researching the sediments of eelgrass beds at South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve (SSNERR). Eelgrass is a vitally important element of estuaries because it provides a wide variety of ecosystem services, like water quality enhancement, erosion control, and habitat for biologically diverse species. My research will help inform the reserve’s eelgrass restoration project, which was started last year in response to the recent rapid decline of eelgrass in the reserve that began in 2016. The REU program has moved at a rapid pace since the first day. I feel challenged and stretched by my work here. It’s especially exciting to work at South Slough, which is a state and federally funded research agency that is mostly separate from OIMB. I get to work with scientists who each have unique interests, experiences, and expertise. The highlight for me has certainly been the fieldwork. I am often invited to work alongside South Slough scientists and interns who are working on their own separate research topics. These experiences have already given me a diverse sampling of data collection and experimental methods. I’ve had so much fun handling crabs, kayaking all around the estuary, and trudging through muddy marshes and sandy shorelines --- all of it with new friends and seasoned professionals. I'm so grateful to have been invited here. |
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