The deadline for posters on Friday really had people buckling down to get all their data collected and analyzed. On Monday I uploaded GPS points from the Winchester arm boat trip on Friday and started making graphs to compare soil composition and salinity. Later on that day, my lab partner and I got to go on a hike to one of South Slough’s weathering monitoring stations. We learned that the station collects data on rainfall, wind speed/direction, sunlight, and much more. We helped upload all the data collected in the past month onto a computer and checked if everything in the station was still intact. Renee checking one of the panels of the weathering monitoring station. This week’s professional development was just us presenting our poster drafts to the group and receiving comments. Seeing how everyone else presented their data was nice since it not only made me understand their projects more but it also gave me ideas on how to edit my own poster. The main comment I got on mine was to make the distribution map bigger, and the only way to do that is to make space by shortening my sentences which is only getting tougher. On Wednesday I headed out to the marshland directly behind Metcalf Islands to collect the last soil samples needed for my project. This place is known as Metcalf Sentinel and will be known as one of the absent birds beak sites. I took samples near the transects set up in the lower marsh area, a place birds beak would most likely be if it grew there. After they were brought back, sieved, dried, and weighed I was able to complete my graphs for soil salinity and grain size. I still have to edit for my graph on associated species and will do that over the weekend. Metcalf Sentinel, one of the sites where birds beak is absent. A jellyfish washed up in one of Metcalf Sentinel's channels. In non-research related news the OIMB Invertebrate ball was on Thursday. I dressed as my favorite nudibranch, Plakobranchus ocellatus, it was interesting to see what people used to make their costumes and cupcakes were beautiful and delicious! Next week my mentor and I will mainly be working on analyzing what factors are affecting the distribution of birds beak the most. I’ll definitely post about it in next week’s blog, my last one! Invertebrate Ball Cupcakes!
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This week I finally got all of the soil samples I have taken from each site through grain-size analysis. There are still more sites to collect soil samples from but getting caught up gave me a slight feeling of relief. Mainly because now I’ve started to organize the soil composition and soil salinity data to create bar graphs for my poster draft. The deadline for poster drafts is coming up next Tuesday and I have been making progress though I am still working on how to present the data on percent plant cover in areas with and without birds beak. I am also working on shortening the methods section of the poster without taking out important pieces of information, which has been a bit of a challenge. As for field work my mentor and I finished surveying Winchester creek and collected soil samples from Danger Creek, one of the absent birds beak sites. Installing new sondes to take water samples every fifteen minutes as a part of South Slough's biomonitoring mission. Besides project work, I have been able to get out more in the slough this week by helping with other South Slough jobs. On Tuesday and Thursday we went out on the boat to take out sondes from monitoring stations throughout the slough. These sondes take samples of the estuary water every fifteen minutes and record characteristics such as temperature, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, and more. Some of these sonde stations were connected to equipment that allowed the data collected to be sent via satellite to the National Estuarine Research Reserve System website. My partner Renee collecting crab traps as a part of her project. I also went out in the mornings to help my lab partner put out crab traps for her experiments on predation. I got to learn some key differences between crab species and after we were done we stopped at Distant Water Fleet, one of the birds beak sites I had already mapped, to collect plant samples for my CMLC presentation. I decided to take samples of indicator species for birds beak, such as sea lavender and sea plantain, along with common lowland marsh plants like pickleweed. I plan on showing these species at the showcase while explaining the environment they grow in. While I can’t bring in samples of birds beak due to it’s endangered status I took some nice close ups to show when I talk about it and it’s role as a hemiparasite. I’ll write about how both the CMLC and poster draft presentation turn out in next week's entry! My new favorite close up of birds beak, one of the pictures I'll be using for my CMLC display.
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AuthorI am an incoming third year student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa studying Oceanography. I’m looking forward to learning all I can about the Oregon Coast from this internship! Archives
August 2019
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