I completed a draft of my methods section to the research project . I have entered all the data into the computer and have been working on making an appropriate map of my site locations using ArcGis. My next trip to the island will be on March 21. During this trip i plan on staking the rebar at each site to allow for future research to be done at the same locations. 
Everyone in class has a map due this week. I took GIS two years ago, and have completely forgotten how to do basic functions since. After a bit of googling, I was able to create a basic map. This is far from the final map, but I’ve learned I need to hone my GIS skills soon.
So here is a first look at the invasive plants in my first sampling site. Definitely needs some more work but as you can see there is not too much in terms of the plants that need to be managed.
I made my last trip up to Lompoc on Friday and finished collecting pine cones! The groves of Bishop pines I found in Lompoc were much larger than the population on Santa Rosa. The mainland population also had noticeably larger pine cones and seemed much healthier than the Island population which could signify that mainland conditions are much more favorable for Bishop pines than island conditions. But the island conditions were much more favorable for me, although the view I had in Lompoc was beautiful I definitely wasn’t alone up there. As you can see from my photo I never got far from a well traveled road so I didn’t get to enjoy the silence of nature like I did on the island.
I also noticed sections of the grove where a fire had gone through and the trees had fallen down. Although I’ve seen patches of fallen trees on the island I never saw so many clumped so close together that had fallen over. It was really cool to see and although many trees died most of them looked like they were of reproductive age so the new generation of bishop pines should be coming in.
Are there any questions? Crickets. Eliciting a response from 60+ college students in General Chemistry at 8:00AM is challenging, at best. I sometimes find myself in the lecture hall thinking I’m part entertainer since the only signs of life are when I tell a chemistry joke or play the sound of crickets (yes, there […]
Talks have begun now about the next trips out to Santa Rosa. One trip I’ve confirmed is March 11-13 which I will hopefully be able to complete tree coring. The next trip will be sometime on spring break however those dates are not confirmed. The goal on that trip is to set demography plots within some of the groves in order to gather further data in the future. Currently paper work and research is continuing. I’ve gotten my methods section revised, work still needs to be done to the introduction. A first draft of one of my maps is complete.
Well during this week I have been busy doing capstone stuff. Channel Islands High School had Monday off this week, so I had nothing to do that day. Then on Tuesday I talked about the Jenga game that we played last time and why we played it. Then there was a guest speaker Jessie Alstatt. Jessie talked about why it is important to do long term studies and about the rocky intertidal species.
Then on Wednesday I introduced the high school students to my online quiz on Kahoot.it. This test had 17 questions on it asking to identify different species that are in the rocky intertidal area. This first test was meant to be a baseline on how much they already knew about the different species that we will be looking at. Most of them did well and others not so well. This was the point of the quiz so it was fine. Then after I gave them the quiz I gave them a quick tutorial on the quiz-let that I am using that the LiMPETS people made to get people to do better then I gave them some time to go over the quiz-let. I was unable to go to the high school classes because I had a class that day that I was unable to miss, so Chris was there and got the students started on their hypothesis and background research. On Friday I was there and I helped Chris to prepare the students in both the Sandy Beach protocol and the Rocky Intertidal area. Chris helped the students with the Sandy Beach stuff and I worked on the Rocky intertidal zone.
Next week the plan is to give the students some more study time, give the kahoot.it quiz one more time, making sure that they know what to bring for the field trip to Carpentaria State Beach, then another guest speaker named Steven that will talk more about the Sandy Beach Protocol. He will do this because he has been doing some research about it and will give the students a lot of good insight about. Then we will be taking the students out to Carp where they will do the research.
Once they do the research they will be working on a presentation for a week and give it to Chris, Erika and myself.
Research is always easier when there are research assistants helping. I would like to thank all the research assistants who helped with the field work or entering data. Both types of assistants helped a lot and made the process go faster.
Special thanks to those who gave up an entire weekend to help with field work.
Left to right: Samantha, Casey, Jeyla, me, Dr. O’Hirok, and Dr. Hartman
Left to right: Dylan, Patrick, Laura, Me
(top) Left to right: Samantha, Dr. O’Hirok, me
(bottom) Left to right: Dylan, Reily, Brenna, and Kevin
(top) Left to right: Dr. O’Hirok, me
(bottom) Left to right: Dylan, Tyler, and Sean
This past week was primarily focused on producing maps in ESRI’s ArcGIS for my final report. The map below shows the locations of my six study sites in the Former Red Gum eucalyptus grove. It should be noted that this is the first draft of this map. Other than preparing maps, the past couple weeks have been pretty quiet. My last update was focused on the seeding that had taken place. I was fortunate to have two storms come through the area after the seed was broadcast! I will be making a trip out to the study sites in the next week to check on any germination progress. Rain is also forecasted for the end of the week, so fingers are crossed that the forecast holds up!
Over the pas week, I finished my beach data collection at Santa Clara River Mouth and Goleta Beach County Park with the help of a few ESRM 100 students. Santa Clara River Mouth’s beach has been wiped clean of any invertebrate life, most likely due to the river breach and large swell conditions. Goleta Beach has also suffered a decrease in invertebrate life and beach architecture due to large scale bulldozing efforts needed to protect coastal developments threatened by the large swell conditions. I am looking forward to running the stats on this collection to find significant connections between these occurrences and ecological health of these sites.
I have also been busy this weekend creating a poster on the effects of petroleum and microplastics on beach health with fellow student Dorothy Horn. We will be presenting our poster at the CSU Chancellor’s conference in Long Beach early next month. Findings from the petroleum experiments suggest that the Refugio Oil spill did not have a lasting effect on invertebrate communities but did harm embryo development of the sand crab Emerita analoga.
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