Tag Archive for: dept-ESRM

A few weeks ago saw me up in Simi Valley speaking to folks from young to old about what began last May 19 at Refugio Beach.  I always enjoy giving one of our monthly installment of the CSU Channel Islands Library Lecture Series, an array of public lectures held across Ventura County open to all comers.  This presentation had a lot of great input and probing queries from this much-engaged crowd.  My screencast below only captures some of this back and forth that extended for 45 minutes post-talk.  Keep those questions coming and keep staying hungry for answers.  More are on the way, but we must be vigilant and never stop our engagement if we hope to have a safer and more sustainable energy infrastructure.

Oil Spills in Context: Understanding Ecological & Sociological Impacts of the
May 2015 Refugio Oil Spill

The Plains All American pipeline rupture on May 19, 2015 spilled an estimated 79,000 l (21,000 gallons, 500 barrels) of unrefined crude oil onto Refugio State Beach (Santa Barbara County, California) and into the Pacific Ocean. Heavy coastal oiling affected Refugio and El Capitan State Beaches immediately. We then entered a period of highly variable tarring episodes impacting beaches as far as 170 km from the break over the ensuing weeks, which in turn created a unique arena in which to test tarring impacts. Sandy beach ecosystems dominate the shorelines of this region and so bore the brunt of the impacts from this spill. The animal diversity on the coast dropped and heretofore unobserved conspicuous dead Emerita analoga (sand crabs) became common in the swash zone across several beaches although an independent decline in sandy beach infaunal diversity/abundance across the region over the past year made oil-associated impact detection problematic. Laboratory experiments confirmed the toxicity of deposited tar to developing crab embryos, juveniles, and adults. The spill had immediate but mostly ephemeral effects on people: reducing summer spending at/near the most heavily tarred beaches by an order of magnitude, halving the number of people who felt Santa Barbara-area seafood was safe to eat, and bolstering support for offshore drilling bans. We will discuss this recent spill in the context of other infamous oil spills including the 1969 Santa Barbara Spill, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, and many others.

I finished the official 2015 vegetation signatures several weeks ago and recently produced a scatter plot example of how the program (GIS) is able to determine these ‘signatures’ based off mathematical equations and different light frequency bands (red, green, blue, inferred ext..). An example is the the dark green blob, which signifies mixed woodland.

Cheryl Hines, Stacey Anderson

Sean and I manning the booth and having a great time talking about micro plastics with people at Paradise Cove

Saturday I was able to have a booth at the LA Water Keeper event at Paradise Cove, Malibu The Annual Stand Up for Clean Water event is awesome as professional athletes along with weekend racers come out and paddle to raise awareness for clean water in Los Angeles county.  Due to some strong winds the first race was cancelled half way thru and the beach party started a little earlier.  But the wind dies down and the relay and kid events still got to go on in the afternoon.  Robert Kennedy Jr. and his wife Cheryl Hines were there to discuss the history and importance of the work that each and every person needs to continue doing to ensure that we keep our watersheds clean.

I spent this past weekend on Santa Rosa Island collecting my final GPS accuracy assessment points, as well as helping with marine debris collection. I was able to run 184 accuracy points which gave me a 84.15% accuracy. This week I plan to finalize all the map years with coinciding vegetation categories as well as matching color ramps.

Once this month watering is done, I will be finished collecting data on the Torrey pines growth rate and heath within each treatment. High leaf litter and high water is still the highest rate of Torrey pine saplings occurring. My hypothesis of which treatments would work best for Torrey pine sapling growth is correct, which was that high leaf litter and high water would have the most growth.