This week started with the monthly water quality samplings the South Slough facilitates as part of it’s estuary biomonitoring mission. This was the second sampling I helped with and I felt like I remembered most of the procedures from last time. We collected three replicates from four sites along the slough and brought them back to the lab for coliform bacteria counts and chlorophyll filtering. The next day I finished up the samples by filtering them for inorganic nutrients, the procedure calls for filtering 400 mL but some samples had so much sediment in them I could only get through 200 mL before it got stuck. This happened more often with the low tide samples than the ones from high tide and it was noticeable just by looking at the color of the filters. IDEXX tray with water sample. The yellow cells mean that it is positive for total coliforms, while the fluorescent cells mean that it is positive for e. coli. On Tuesday I also attended the professional development session where we went over how to organize our posters. This past week I have been writing out the text for my poster and it has been a little trickier than writing my proposal mainly due to the limited space. Finding the most important points to highlight and make it clear for people to understand is another challenge. Along with posters we also went over the public presentations we would be giving on August 3rd from 11-2 pm at the Charleston Marine Life Center. It isn’t really a formal presentation, we are just setting up booths in the marine center that have educational and interactive activities about our research. I had an idea of bringing certain samples of lowland and highland marsh plants and showing people how to identify them. I would then have them match the sample to the correct one in a memory-like game. It isn’t entirely clear but I am looking forward to this sort of practice presentation. Collecting soil samples at Hidden Creek Marsh. Wednesday was a full day out in the slough, we went kayaking to map areas surrounding Daycreek Marsh and other areas further south. In Daycreek Marsh we found some individuals and large patches growing along the edge path. Some of these large patches had tons of sea lavender growing along with the birds beak. I’ve noticed more of the sea lavender have been blooming lately and was able to get some pictures of their flowers. There are still a couple of sites we need to search for birds beak in and I am starting to get soil samples from areas where birds beak is not present. I hope to analyze all of the samples I have so far and map more areas within the next week. Sea Lavender, Limonium californicum, seems to be blooming about now.
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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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