Surfrider Meeting & Preliminary Findings
The Surfrider meeting was a success! For not knowing what to expect and being a liiiiiittle nervous, I’d say it was a pretty good turn 
out! Everyone was super nice and I am so happy we got the opportunity to share what we’ve been working on. I hope more ESRM students can present some of their research to Surfrider in the future. The cool thing about that meeting was that it forced me to look into my data closer (mostly so I would have something to present) and I ended up finding something pretty interesting.
Since I only have one season of fall data from Santa Rosa Island so far and I didn’t have access to the entire historical database yet, I took information off the 1990 CINP Marine Debris Technical Report. In that document, the number of items of marine debris were listed in 5 broad categories: miscellaneous plastics, derelict fishing gear, non-plastics, plastic packaging, and personal plastic items aka personal effects. I then took the proportion of items in each category out of the total number of items collected that season. I did the same to the data I had from this fall; placed items into the same categories and took a proportion and some the very early results were interesting!
The most interesting thing to me was that the percentage of derelict fishing gear found in 1990 on Santa Rosa & San Miguel was ~5% of all trash found, but in 2015 it had risen to ~26% of all trash found on Santa Rosa! Commercial and recreational fishing in the SB Channel has changed immensely in the past ~25 years, and I kind of wish I had mentioned that more during the Surfrider presentation, but I wasn’t 100% sure about the specifics of it it until I talked to some people afterwards, some being commercial fishermen. For example, the local lobster fishery has taken off as well as the squid, and urc
hin fisheries and technology has changed immensely in the past ~25 years. The creation of MPA’s on within CINMS has also changed things in the fishing industry, and I think all of these factors contribute or have some effect on why we are seeing more derelict fishing gear than other marine debris items now as opposed to the early 90’s. I plan to look more into this as my capstone research continues, but that’s where I am at this week. Back to writing my methods!
