Mainland Collections

/in /by

Although I already finished my collection of pine cones on the island I still have to finish collecting seeds from the mainland population.  This morning I located a pine grove near Lompoc California and started my collection but i have to make one more trip back to get a few more pine cones.  It was a beautiful are in the hills above Lompoc but I missed the secluded nature of the island.  While there i noticed that there were much fewer dying trees and the majority of the trees in this population were taller than those of the Santa Rosa Island population.  There were also  far fewer saplings in the mainland grove.  The most notable difference I saw between the two populations was the size of the pine cones.  The many of cones of the mainland population were far larger and much longer spines than those on the island leading me to believe that the climate on the coast is more suitable to the Bishop pines than the climate on Santa Rosa Island.

 

IMG_20160205_175259_218

Amazing presentation at Ventura Surfrider!

/in /by

Tuesday night at Patagonia headquarters Dr Clare Steele, Michaela Miller and I presented our Pervasive Plastics research to the Ventura Surfrider chapter.  The rise above plastics campaign from the national surfrider foundation is directly inline with our overall project of removing plastics from our sandy beach and marine environment and educating the public on the need for change.

We were able to discuss our current projects and where we are headed with the different facets of the plan.  I was very excited to meet so many other people that love the beach and want to protect it! I hope that more students from The ESRM Dept at CSU Channel Islands will be able to share their projects and be able to achieve a higher rate of public involvement.

Great Article on My Project!

/in /by

VC Reporter story on Pervasive Plastics  was published today about Dr. Clare Steele’s library talk on plastics in our environment and my research on the discovery of microplastic ingestion by Sand crabs.

More Plastics…

/in /by

Reporters are continuing to cover our work on documenting the magnitude of plastic pollution across our world ocean and the potential impacts from all this unintended petroleum waste, both macro and micro.  This week our CSUCI team headed over to downtown Ventura for a presentation to the general public on what we have found to date.

The VCReporter‘s Chris O’Neal covered this in a story that ran today:

Clare Steele is an associate professor of environmental science and resource management at California State University, Channel Islands, in Camarillo. Steele conducted research, along with seniors Dorothy Horn and Michaela Miller, that shows that plastic pollution, in particular so-called microplastics, has been found within the food chain through sand crabs, which in turn are eaten by shorebirds, who themselves are eaten by fish that could be consumed by humans.
“This is a considerable global problem that we’re really just getting a handle on,” said Steele. “We’ve known about plastic pollution on a large scale for quite some time, but people are really starting to focus on the microplastics.”
Steele and her undergraduate students began researching the topic of microplastic pollution by collecting sand samples from around the world, and in particular from Northern California and all the way to the Mexico coast.
“We’re getting samples of sand from Grand Cayman in the Caribbean, from South Africa and from Hawaii, and we’re finding this microplastic pollution in every place that we look,” said Steele.
Microplastic are, simply put, the remnants of the plastic bottles, bags, fishing lines, etc., that have broken down into smaller and smaller pieces rather than biodegrading into the environment, thereby creating pieces of plastic from half a millimeter in size to microscopic, unable to be seen by the human eye…

Dorothy Horn is a CSUCI senior studying environmental science and resource management and is one of Steele’s students. Since September 2015, Horn has dissected 125 sand crabs found on beaches from Alaska to San Diego and has discovered, thus far, that roughly 35 percent of them have “ambient fibers” within them.
Aside from being a danger to the animals that ingest them, Horn says these pollutants have a hidden danger to humans as well.
“In other species, invertebrates, mammals, they’ve shown to cause endocrine disruption, as in changes in hormone production,” said Horn, adding that increased hormones can disrupt reproduction. “If a little fish eats a little crab and so on up the food chain and then we eat the fish, well, there’s something called bio-accumulation of toxins that could have an effect on us.”
Toxins, says Steele, cling to plastics in the ocean like Velcro, creating a concentrated area of chemicals that leech out of the plastic.

Read the whole story here.

Anyone wanting a slightly shorter (than the hour long public lecture) and more technical overview of our microplastics work can check out this presentation (sorry for the lame camera work on my part) from a conference in Sacramento in November 2015:

Also, don’t forget our recent story in the Ventura County Star on microplastics.

Surfrider Meeting & Preliminary Findings

/in /by

The Surfrider meeting was a success! For not knowing what to expect and being a liiiiiittle nervous, I’d say it was a pretty good turn IMG_8843out! Everyone was super nice and I am so happy we got the opportunity to share what we’ve been working on. I hope more ESRM students can present some of their research to Surfrider in the future. The cool thing about that meeting was that it forced me to look into my data closer (mostly so I would have something to present) and I ended up finding something pretty interesting.

Since I only have one season of fall data from Santa Rosa Island so far and I didn’t have access to the entire historical database yet, I took information off the 1990 CINP Marine Debris Technical Report. In that document, the number of items of marine debris were listed in 5 broad categories: miscellaneous plastics, derelict fishing gear, non-plastics, plastic packaging, and personal plastic items aka personal effects. I then took the proportion of items in each category out of the total number of items collected that season. I did the same to the data I had from this fall; placed items into the same categories and took a proportion and some the very early results were interesting!

The most interesting thing to me was that the percentage of derelict fishing gear found in 1990 on Santa Rosa & San Miguel was ~5% of all trash found, but in 2015 it had risen to ~26% of all trash found on Santa Rosa! Commercial and recreational fishing in the SB Channel has changed immensely in the past ~25 years, and I kind of wish I had mentioned that more during the Surfrider presentation, but I wasn’t 100% sure about the specifics of it it until I talked to some people afterwards, some being commercial fishermen. For example, the local lobster fishery has taken off as well as the squid, and urcSlide5hin fisheries and technology has changed immensely in the past ~25 years. The creation of MPA’s on within CINMS has also changed things in the fishing industry, and I think all of these factors contribute or have some effect on why we are seeing more derelict fishing gear than other marine debris items now as opposed to the early 90’s. I plan to look more into this as my capstone research continues, but that’s where I am at this week. Back to writing my methods!

 

Click to access Guenther-et-al-Appl-Geo-2015.pdf

Paradoxes as a Reader

/in /by

For years upon years I thought I had known how to read, I was taught how to read when I was in the first grade. To be quite frank I wasn’t the best reader, but I didn’t give up and I kept trying until I was able to read past two grade levels. Well after all that time I still had no idea I did not know how to read! Hearing that there was a second way and even multiple ways of reading blows me away, because how did I not know about these type of reading styles until thirteen years later. One of these new found reading styles was reading like a writer, which at first sounds like an oxymoron but with some explanation makes a lot of sense.

Reading like a writer is the premise where instead of reading to gather information like normal typical reading styles. Reading like a writer consist of reading in such a way that lends us the ability to learn how a sentence was formed and learn from it so we could then in turn regurgitate back (p. 74). Take for example instead of learning about how gothic cathedrals were build and there history behind them, Reading like a writer offers the reader the ability to build the cathedrals themselves. Oddly enough, even though this is a fairly new thing that I have just recently grasp I feel like I have always kind of read in this way but in a lower elementary type of way.

Despite our instructors never fully teaching us how to read like a writer, but wanting us to grasp it on our own I feel I have persionally did a decent job at it (P. 75). In the recent past months last semester actually during my Environmental class were “forced” to read a book titled Cradle to Cradle written by  William McDonough and Michael Braungart where I had used this type of reading style. The novel in short explained how we live in a cradle to grave society throwing away everything we ever use, and how with proper implementation we can transform into a cradle to cradle society. Well in short we had to read this novel, because we had write a final paper for the class which is the ultimate reason as to why I learned how to read in such a way.

cradle-to-cradle-1024-blog-post

The novel was filled with so much insight and information that at first it was so over whelming but soon after I had took my time I was able to gather all the information that was being presented in front of me. Well as it turned out it was perfect timing because I had to participate in many group decisions and arguments about the environment. Now although I was reading this novel for the first time I was not only learning the information that was intended for me to learn but I was underdatnding how the authors had used the information to present their arguments. With me understanding how they presented their arguments I was able to utilze their own techniques for my own self interest.

This is not so much a story of how I actually used reading like a writer, because I believe me telling you would do absolutely nothing for you. Instead this is a story demonstrating that it actually works and I am living proof of it. I have to say and be completely honest that when using reading like a writer, I truly believed I had wrote one of my best essays. So I encourage others to try reading a writer out because one would find that it actually works!

Works Cited

Bunn, Mike.”How to Read Like a Writer.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. Ed. Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky. Vol. 1. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor P, 2010. 71-86. Writing Spaces. Web. 2 Feb. 2016.

Blog Entry #1 ENG 107

/in /by

“The more we know about how to analyze situations and draw informed conclusions, the better we can become about making savvy judgments about the people, situations and media we encounter” (Carroll, 46).

In the article “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps toward Rhetorical Analysis“, I have learned that on the subject of rhetoric, it is everywhere. It is in social media, the food we eat, our favorite movies, and even how we dress. As human beings, we do not even think about rhetoric analysis, it is more of like a second nature. That is what I find so fascinating about rhetorical analysis. Looking at a person who walks in the room, we make vast judgment on how this person really is.

I have recently checked out a book from the library and it is called Powder Monkey. It takes place in the year 1800 and Britain was at war with the French. A thirteen year-old boy named Samuel Witchall is revealing his story about how he was referred to as a “powder monkey”. Samuel loved the sea and always wanted to work on a crew ship for the Royal Navy, but his father would not let him. Instead his father said he could work as a ship’s boy as a merchantmen. As I said he loved the sea and embraced the ocean. “…, I would climb to the top of the foremast, and, with my face full of wind, could make-believe I was flying over the sea like a great white gull. I loved the dawn and dusk best” ( Dowswell 17). When it comes to the subject of rhetoric, Sam shows so much imagery in the way he speaks about the ocean. Not just in this text but also in others. I feel if I have met Samuel Witchall in person (which I highly doubt), I feel he would want to explain to me why taking any opportunity to sail the seven sea’s would be best thing that could ever happen to a human being. He would most definitely use ethos, pathos, and logos to tell me why it is the best thing in the world.

I usually do not like to read. Actually I hate it. But I believe and proven myself that I can actually be interested in a book and analyse the book whether I am finished with it or not.

Data Analysis

/in /by

IMG_20160116_114252I’ve got all my data on ArcGIS and now I just have to clean it up. That means lots of buffering points and lines! So far the data is very heavily leaning toward invasive plants being mostly on trails leading to the campgrounds. There are absolutely no invasives logged up Soledad Canyon Road, where the foot traffic isn’t directly coming from the boat. I will update with the map as soon as it looks a little closer to complete!

In the photo above: Collecting data on the canopy coverage of the Eucalyptus trees on the island with Dr. Geoff Dilly and Lea Gephart as my assistants for the day.

Socks or Sandals

/in /by

My first day of class, seemed like the serial moment mentioned in the first paragraph of the article “Backpacks VS. Briefcases: toward Rhetorical Analysis” This reference in the book shows an illustration of assumptions and predetermination as a tool to persuade or appeal to a specific  target audience.Throughout the article, the author mentioned the importance of persuasion. The introduction of the media was presented as an example of how communication and  analyses are byproducts to change people’s perspective of facts and information.

political-science

After I read the article, “Backpacks VS. Briefcases: toward Rhetorical Analysis” I started to see similarities in concepts to my Political science book, “Environmental politics and policies.”  Throughout the book, “Environmental politics and policies” there is an example in the book that illustrates the ideas of persuasion through communication. The idea that information can be scud, and exploded is presented in this book. the author Mac Smith, gives an illustration of a king that shows the glass half full to his peasants, than half empty because he doesn’t want their productivity to slow down or show the evidence that he used majority of the resources.

One of the first places to start is context. Rhetorical messages always occur in a specific situation or context.” The president’s speech might respond to a specific global event, like an economic summit; that’s part of the context”. (Carroll 48) and the way, the speaker explotes the context by adding facts that lead to a bies conclusion.

Word Cited

Bolin, Laura Carroll. “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps Toward Rhetorical Analysis.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. Ed. Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky. Vol. 1. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor P, 2010. 45-58. Writing Spaces. Web. 27 Jan. 2016.

Blog Entry #1

/in /by

Rhetoric is the way we use language and images to persuade (Carroll, 46). As explained in the article, “Backpacks vs. Briefcases” there are many components that go into a good argument that captivates the audience. One of those components is rhetorical appeals, such as Aristotle’s pathos, ethos, and logos. Another is the rhetorical triangle, consisting of the writer, reader, and purpose. Most texts, media, and advertisements use rhetorical appeals and the rhetorical triangle as the foundation of their arguments to persuade the reader to the purpose of the text, such as convincing them to purchase a product. The article “‘Screen’ Lets Parents Control Kids’ Devices From Anywhere” is a good example concerning a rhetorical analysis.

Just by reading the first few paragraphs the rhetorical triangle can be established. The writer/speaker is Dan Tynan from the modern family section of Tech apart of the Yahoo news. The intended audience for this piece would be adults with children who use technology frequently. The purpose of the article is to persuade these parents that the device “screen” is something they should invest in for the protection/ well-being of their kids and to be able to control their activities/time on their electronic devices.

In the article, it says, “According to research firm Childwise, children age 5 to 16 spend an average of 6.5 hours a day glued to computers, phones, tablets, and televisions — often viewing multiple screens at the same time” (Tynan,1). This quote uses logos, meaning logic/statistics/facts in the opening paragraph to present the audience how much time their children spend on electronic devices to hopefully persuade them that this needs to be controlled.

It also says, “The phone app allows parents to adjust schedules on the fly as needed — if, say, your child needs an extra 15 minutes to complete a homework assignment. Want to get everyone’s attention in a hurry? Launch the Screen app and just shake your phone; all of the devices it controls will shut off instantly” (Tynan,1). This excerpt also demonstrates logos by explaining that the product can be used to control the activity of a screen in seconds and that parents should buy the device because it is easily accessible and much needed when it comes to monitoring kids and devices. The quote also appeals to pathos, which is defined as emotion. This can be seen in the diction used in the quote, such as “ want to get everyone’s attention in a hurry”. For it suggest that parents are not always able to get control of their children’s attention due to the distraction of their device, and this device, the “screen” will enable parents to have the full attention of their children.

Works Cited:

Bolin, Laura Carroll. “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps Toward Rhetorical Analysis.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. Ed. Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky. Vol. 1. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor P, 2010. 45-58. Writing Spaces. Web. 29 Jan. 2016.

Tynan, D. (n.d.). ‘Screen’ Lets Parents Control Kids’ Devices From Anywhere. Retrieved February 03, 2016, from https://www.yahoo.com/tech/39-screen-39-lets-parents-control-kids-1356166166388790.html