Tag Archive for: dept-ESRM

Well I went to the Channel Islands High School and I gave them the last survey. It was good I was a little sad because I won’t be seeing them until April when we go to Santa Rosa.

I have also just started to get all of my data into one place where I can start getting an idea of what it is showing me. I had a meeting with Sean Anderson to talk about what I should be looking for in my data and how I should proceed So that is what it is all looking like. I hope that all of my data turns out well

The past few weeks have consisted of compiling all my data and organizing it into tables. Here is a table showing chlorophyll levels in each stream section over time.

Summerland, CA Beach just below Lookout Park.  Image: Harry Rabin, 2016

For the past several days we have been seeing unusually heavy oil deposition along the beaches in Summerland, centered just below Lookout Park.  While we have been in a period of higher than normal seep activity for the past year or so, this tarring event seems beyond a mere seep event.  This smacks of some type of oiling event from an (as of yet) unknown source, discrete or well bore.

ESRM Tech Lab as Studio

In the midst of teaching my “Intro to Drones” class (ESRM 370) this past Friday, we got a ring from our local ABC affiliate, KEYT3 TV.  They were looking for comment on this beach deposition, but my packed schedule was too full to arrange a regular interview on camera.  Cue our new ESRM web camera and Skype.  While Skype’s low-res connection didn’t do justice to that new HD camera, this was another example of the power of CSUCI and ESRM.  Our interdisciplinary perspectives, community service orientation, and desire to communicate more widely motivated the purchase of that new camera a mere week before.  On top of that, our brand-new, well-lit Tech Lab in Sierra Hall proved a convenient backdrop for an interview after our class wrapped up and before I had to run off to another meeting.  Much thanks to Kim Gregory, CSUCI’s great Press Office, and AARR’s Tim Holcombe’s Skyping skills to get the whole hook-up in place while I was running between students and engagements.

Tim on tech detail as we did a sound check before the questions flowed.

KEYT pulled together a brief, but nice piece in time for their 5 O-Clock news (below).

Becker Well

Many locals have been quite concerned for several years about potential releases from the Becker Well or similar such long-abandoned, but not necessarily properly capped, wells.  The Becker Well was drilled sometime in the late 1800s, predating our modern suite of resource management agencies, modern environmental regulations, and even effective drilling records.  Becker is in the surf zone.  This appears to in part explain why it was never properly abandoned.  It has a history of small but persistent oil leaks, apparently often being behind deposition onto the beach or into the nearshore ocean off Summerland’s coast.  These ongoing drip-drip-drip of oil releases motivated the State Lands Commission to begin a re-excavation and attempt to reseal the well starting in late fall of 2015.

Images: State Lands Commission Press Release on November 2, 2015.

This past week, I was working on my results where I found that there  is a decline in the Torrey pine population growth within the demography plots. It is quiet fascinating, in how Travis Hall and Andrew Brinkman found that the population was increasing with their data collection. Additionally, it will be interesting to see how this data will will correlate with the common garden experiment, which might shed some light on why there has been a decrease in the population growth.