Posts

Education Opportunity

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Throughout the semester I have been increasing my knowledge of the Torrey pine through my research and first hand experience with my field study. An opportunity has presented itself where I can give back to the local community and take part in a teaching opportunity at R.J Frank Junior High School in Oxnard on December 10. This will allow me to give a brief 10-15 minute presentation and share my knowledge with a younger generation. Hopefully to show them how fun research can be and inspire some to pursue an education in the sciences.

Research Update 12/6/15

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Research is continuing smoothly. The initial field research is nearing an end on Santa Rosa Island. I have made two 3 daytrips to the island and completed two of the four groves involved with the demography plots completely. I am returning over the break for a week long research trip where I will complete my field demography studies.

Onset Data Logger

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The next step in my lagoons capstone project is to deploy the Onset HOBO salinity reader.  SRIRS has purchased one, and NPS purchased one as well.  We have been debating putting both in the same lagoon, or one in each.  We are also figuring out how often the meter needs to be calibrated and cleaned to make sure it doesn’t get fouled up.

This is a link to the logger we purchased.  http://www.onsetcomp.com/products/data-loggers/u24-002-c

More poster presentations

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This week for my capstone I went to Frank Intermediate School to listen to the presentations about the Santa Clara watershed. Students at Channel Island High school did the same project you can read about in the “unit 2” blog post. Again the presentations were on invasive species Arundo, endangered species Bell’s Vireo, water quality, and urban runoff. Students needed to take notes and answer some questions about each presentation. Even though the students were nervous about giving their presentations they were done really well. Unfortunately I do not have any pictures of the posters. This will be our last class visit for now. We will return to the schools in February to start unit 3. From this point on my capstone partner and I will be working on lesson plans and tests to give to the students which will be our main data collection for our project.

PAPER TIME!

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My next trip out the island isn’t until January and I think I should be able to finish marking the rest of the trees in the first couple days!  Until then the outline for my paper is due so the next week is going to be a grind.  I can’t wait to be done with that and get back out to the island to finish up my data collection.

 

Break Between Island Trips

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I took my last trip out to the island for the year and counted about 200 trees! Now it’s time to research papers and analyze data, so my view went from this

 

to this

Cross-section/data set example

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Using the total station survey tool i am able to take cross-sections of the Water Canyon stream channels. With these cross-sections i can calculate sediment flow. The visual representations shown below, also make it possible to observe changes between physical upstream and downstream stream attributes.

Cross section

Island travel

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Throughout this semester (August-November 2015) i was able to travel to the Santa Rosa Island many times. I was on the island a total of 16 days over multiple weekends to conduct research, and collect data. Over this time i was able to record multiple cross-sections throughout Water Canyon. Here is a photo that shows my cross-section locations within the watershed.

DylanCapstonepaper

Santa Rosa Island

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Here is a photo of Santa Rosa Island  DylanCapstonePapermap2

This week

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Yesterday (12/05/15) I went to FJ Middle School and I listened to their presentations. They had the same information and the same groups as the high school but to recap the groups were endangered species, macroinverts, water chemistry, surface water runoff and invasive species. The middle schoolers are for sure more into this program that we are doing then the high schoolers. I think this would be because the middle school is made specifically for kids that want to go into the sciences and have classes designed for this. Whereas the high school is more standardized, more general classes. For the presentations the FJ middle schoolers did very well, they were a little hard to hear at time but they had all of the info and where using words that I would never had used at that age and seemed to know how to use them correctly. They all did very well. I look forward to the days that I am there.