Tag Archive for: instructor-sean.anderson

I had the opportunity to spend a week out on the island to work on my capstone so I was there from January 12th through the 19th. As much as I thought I’d be able to get everything done in a week, I realistically only had enough time to finish up one of my sampling sites which was Point of Entry 1 (see previous post for map). This was the area around the pier, the bunkhouse, and the historical buildings. Who knew picking through grass would take so long?

The above image is a very close up shot of Shortpod Mustard (Hirschfeldia incana). This is one of the invasive plants I was looking out for while sampling my site. In the close up you can see the white/gray hairs on the stem of the plant.

The sandy beach research is coming along well so far. Over winter break, I was able to revisit my twelve beach sites from Santa Monica to Refugio State Beach. I have found that the Nothern Ventura County and Santa Barbara County beaches have higher species richness and heterogeneity than do beaches further south. I have also found that overall, beach invertebrate communities have declined since the summer sampling took place. I speculate that this decline in invertebrate presence is likely due to increased wave and physical energy during this year’s winter swells and storms.

In addition to these findings, I have noticed that multiple beaches are being bulldozed to protect the upper beach during these large winter swells. One of these beaches is Goleta County beach which is a site that has been sampled multiple times throughout the history of this ecology project. I plan on sampling again at this site in the next 2 weeks in order to find out if this bulldozing has had a significant effect on invertebrate communities.

A recent natural phenomena has occurred that may also effect sandy beach biological communities. Due to the increase in rain, Santa Clara River Mouth breached its sand bar that separated it from the ocean. This event rarely takes place, so it should be interesting to see the effects this breach has had on the sandy beach region of this site. I plan on conducting another sampling at this beach within the next 2 weeks.

The last two months have been winter break and research has been going well. I was able to finish my 2015 GIS vegetation map of SRI! I also made it out to the island for a week and collected 73 ground truth points. The points were collected with the protocol of a <30m swath of the same vegetation type, points were dropped at different locations spanning nearly half of the island (Hiked 100+ miles). The points gathered will be added to another roughly 150 points so that a robust accuracy assessment of the map can be taken. My next step before completing the accuracy assessment is to import the three maps (93, 2010, 2015) into ENVI so that dark object subtraction can be done. After the Dark Object Subtraction is complete the maps will be ready for statistical analysis, different landforms (ridges, valleys, coastal bluffs, slopes ext..) will be compared to each other as well as the change in vegetation cover.

The local Ventura Surfrider has invited us to share our research project as it falls in line with the “Rise Above Plastics” campaign.  Tuesday, February 2nd at Patagonia Headquarters in Ventura Dr. Clare Steele, Michaela Miller and I will be presenting our research projects of Pervasive Plastics in our sandy beach environment.

On Wednesday Erika, Cause Chris and I had a very good meeting with our contacts in the LiMPETS program whose names are Jessie Altstatt and Julie Bursek. It was a really good and productive meeting. Since they have been working on a number of changes on the program. The changes as far as I can tell have been made to make teaching and learning to do the program a little easier for everyone. They have shorten the species list that we are looking in the tidepools. This was made because about half of the species are not often seen in our area so they were taken out. In regards to making it easier to teach, Jessie and Julie are trying to make multiple tiers in which are more appropriate standards for people of varying qualifications. They are working on this to not only make teaching this either easier or slightly harder for some people but to also have better quality data. There have been multiple groups that want to use the data that is being collected but for many reasons they don’t want to give this data out knowing that people could possibly use it to make big decisions.

Quality control is a big deal since data can be used for many purposes and people often want good quality data for these decisions. For a lot of students that go out on this trip will be the first time that they go out and see the ocean. With this knowledge these students will not be particularly interested on working on science but will want to play in the water or in the sand. This data would most likely not be high in quality so it isn’t right to present it as good data. Julie and Jessie are trying to make different activities that are better for students that just want to play. There will be multiple tiers as I said so there would be more activites for more advance students. This is the main way that Julie and Jessie are trying to increase the quality of the data.

During our time in the meeting we talked about all of this and what they have also been looking at for the changes and if we would be interested in helping them get data sorted and to get more data that will help with the changes. We also went over where we will be looking at the tidepools once we take the kids out and where we will be looking at the sand crabs/ mole crabs. There was very little change being done to the mole crab part of LiMPETS that review went smoothly.

Once we were all done talking we went down to the beach area where we will be taking the kids in February, it should be a very interesting time once it all comes together. I am very excited about it. Hopefully it will all go relatively smoothly.