American Association of Geographers

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Over the past week the American Association of Geographers had there annual 2016 conference in San Francisco. I presented my capstone work during the “Challenges of the Anthropocene” poster section. Also during the conference I was able to network with other professional geographers who are doing very similar research as mine. The conference was an amazing experience and allowed me to share my results at Port Hueneme beach. I look forward to connecting and presenting more in future conferences.IMG_7999 (1)

Last Santa Rosa Island Trip

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I was on the island from march 21-25. This will serve as my last trip out to the island for my capstone research. During this time i staked rebar at each of my survey sites. To do this we were granted permission by the national park service. This helps to make each site permanently marked to allow future researchers to find and more accurately take cross-sections at each site. I also observed a small deposition event in the upper reaches of the stream channel that i resurveyed to calculate the amount of change. Below is a graph that shows the amount of deposition that occurred.

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AAG 2016

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I joined a group of CI ESRM students and Professor O’Hirok at the annual Association of American Geographers conference last week. I presented a poster on my capstone research during a poster session titled “Challenges of the Anthropocene”. My poster was received well although it was focused on coastal ecology and the conference’s focus was physical geography. I was able to speak a few professors and graduate students from universities around the country to get a better idea for where I should eventually apply to graduate school.

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AAG

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AAG

This weekend I attended and participated in a conference in San Francisco. The poster presentation was a collection of three studies that analyzed Water Canyons Watershed. The main factors of the study were looking at the stream channel formation and the vegetation dynamics.

More Outliers

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Last weekend I collected data on 430 trees. I am also beginning to run various statistics with the data collected. As I close in toward the end of my study, I am beginning to see trends in the data. These graphs and statistics can help prove various growth rates and effectiveness of slope, aspect, height, DBH and other data sets.

Research update from spring break!

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As you know, I have finished all of my sampling for my thesis research and I am almost finished analyzing all of the data. During spring break, I began a spring sampling of a few of our sandy beaches to help the project ACCESO summer research institute gather data before summer research begins. I took a few small teams out to help count and classify some beach invertebrates. Sampling is completed in Ventura county but still needs to be conducted in Santa Barbara and LA counties.

camila helping at hueneme

Done with Data Collection!

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1621993_180197672365822_7483362726376425071_nI spent the week of spring break out on Santa Rosa Island and was determined to finish up my data collection. Luckily, with the help of Joe Ferguson, I wrapped up all the data collection for my capstone! In the photo above is me and my awesome research assistant after sampling the campsite.

One more data collection

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I am going to collect the last of my water quality data this weekend, since it is supposed to rain. I have also been working on editing my paper and finalizing some of my GIS interpretations.

Got my Scuba Open Water Cert!

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This weekend I finished my Open Water Dive certification with a couple friends.  We are all going to get our AAUS Scientific Dive done this June to be ready for underwater research.

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Vegetation is holding me down

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My entire paper is essentially complete except for formatting. Well, aside from the fact that it’s becoming a nuisance trying to find a way to represent the vegetation in the creek. Because the vegetation surveys that I did were at a different number system than the topographical surveys; the data shows vegetation in areas that, in the topographical surveys, could be on top of a rock or on the side of a cut bank. I underestimated the necessary precision for fluvial geomorphology. The slightest difference within the graphed cross-sections could represent a huge portion of data: a moved rock, a larger thalweg, a new thalweg, build up of debris. However, it seems so simple, but at the same time a waste of time, to eliminate my vegetation data and simply post pictures.

(Site 3 downstream) After Debris Flow 2014:
Site 3 downstream (Kelsey
(Site 3 downstream) February 26, 2016:
Site 3 Downstream