I started unit 3 on Friday and it was a great start. The studens got a lecture about long-term monitoring and why it’s important. It was also the first time I was able to get some data for my capstone. I gave the survey to the students and for the whole unit I will be writing down how the students are responding to the lesson.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’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.
The last few weeks of Winter Break has been very productive. At the beginning of break, I processed the majority of my sand samples. This data will tell us the grain size of the sand and how it is distributed across the beach through the different times of the year. During break, I also successfully surveyed Port Hueneme on some low tides prior to and after some of our winter storms. This will be compared against the previous movement of the sand and allow us to track the movement of the sand. Visually, my profiles are also showing the movement and down coast. Primarily understanding my data are proving the movement of the Port Hueneme 
sand.
At the end of January 2016, my capstone has evolved into an examination of relationships between solar radiation levels and land topography. The scientific research into this relationship has been explored more and more in recent years, as the nature of solar radiation levels and impacts on climate shifts and changes to vegetation and hydrology become ever more critical. Among many research papers to be published on the subject, a few notable examples include:
Impact of 3-D topography on surface radiation budget over the Tibetan Plateau; Wei-Liang Lee, et al.; Theoretical & Applied Climatology, July 2013.
GIS-based modelling of topography-induced solar radiation variability in complex terrain for data sparse region; Min Liu, et al.; International Journal of Geographical Information Science; July 2012.
A comparative analysis of DEM-based models to estimate solar radiation in mountainous terrain; J.A. Ruiz-Arias, et al.; International Journal of Geographical Information Science; Aug. 2009.
The land surrounding the Cal State CI campus possesses a wide range of topographical features, from steep canyons to vast flat farmland to stretches of sandy beaches. Using the combined data from solar radiation level collection at specific points along with levels obtained from satellite imagery, a picture can be formed using GIS applications to in essence “map” the solar radiation levels and variability for the area. This work has the potential to be of great use to many fields of science as well as land planning and management.
Over the break I spent 11 days on SRI on this trip I GPS waypointed 1600 tress and still have many more to go. The project is moving foward and the GIS work is starting to move foward.
Over the break I went to five locations: Santa Clara River (two locations), San Francisquito Canyon, Bouquet Creek, and Soledad Canyon. I not only looked for fish, I also took pictures of the location sites so I can asses the changes before and after El Niño. The only place I found fish was under Bouquet Canyon Bridge in the Santa Clara where the Valencia Wastewater Treatment Plant releases its water. There were several species of fish in the small pond but most were too big in size to be considered stickleback. Due to scheduling conflicts and unavailability of the lab I was not able to complete water quality probe training which I was not happy about considering we have already had a few big rains. My next steps are to collect water and sand samples for evaluation through Dorothy’s microplastic project, and to follow up on some tips as to other locations the UTS may be present.
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