Field data collection is finished!

Over the pas week, I finished my beach data collection at Santa Clara River Mouth and Goleta Beach County Park with the help of a few ESRM 100 students. Santa Clara River Mouth’s beach has been wiped clean of any invertebrate life, most likely due to the river breach and large swell conditions. Goleta Beach has also suffered a decrease in invertebrate life and beach architecture due to large scale bulldozing efforts needed to protect coastal developments threatened by the large swell conditions. I am looking forward to running the stats on this collection to find significant connections between these occurrences and ecological health of these sites.

I have also been busy this weekend creating a poster on the effects of petroleum and microplastics on beach health with fellow student Dorothy Horn. We will be presenting our poster at the CSU Chancellor’s conference in Long Beach early next month. Findings from the petroleum experiments suggest that the Refugio Oil spill did not have a lasting effect on invertebrate communities but did harm embryo development of the sand crab Emerita analoga.