simpple025: LTER

Showing posts with label LTER. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Reflections from the Everglades

vivien January 21, 2014 0

Queue cliché and sappy background music

Five years of trudging through the mangrove and sawgrass swamps of the Everglades. Five years of collecting water samples, analyzing samples, and presenting the major findings across the country. All of those years, and now finally it comes to fruition…the Dissertation Defense.

Yes, I finally made it. As some of you know, there is no clear-cut path (that would be environmentally irresponsible), but instead it can be a long and arduous road. It is on this journey of science that we go from seeing just a tree to seeing the forest. I can’t speak for everyone, but I liken grad school to a roller coaster; the ups

the downs,

and the exciting twists and turns.

And in the end, the ride slows down and then stops to let you out. When you step out, sure you have a cool looking degree, get to wear a fancy gown, and have a prestigious prefix, but its way more than that. You have gone through the gauntlet and survived. Just think back out all the things you have accomplished; the presentations you've made, the people you've connected with, the knowledge you have acquired in the field and in the lab, the deadlines you thought you weren't going to make, the amazing sites that you've seen, etc. Those accomplishments will be what you remember later when you’re working in academia, the government, or private industry. In addition, it’s not just the accomplishments, it’s also the process;

Long days out in field,

all-nighters before deadlines,

the “Aha!” moments,

that help contribute to who we are as researchers.

In the words of President Kennedy, “We choose […] to do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win".

I am glad to have been part of the LTER program, and more specifically the Florida Coastal Everglades LTER of which I do not intend to break ties with. There are so many amazing opportunities that the LTER program has offered, and I am glad that I was able to participate where and when I could. I encourage those of you involved in the LTER to make efforts to join in on many of these opportunities from the LTER ASM (next one 2015) to various LTER workshops. You can even make your own opportunities through collaborations with faculty and other students in the LTER program. And for those of you not involved with the LTER, I encourage you to read up on some of the awesome research that the LTER contributes to the science community.

This was [a portion] of my contribution...

...linking ion concentrations with spectral reflectance, estimating changes to evapotranspiration, and identifying groundwater flow and biogeochemical pathways.

I hope to contribute more to our understanding of coastal systems and interrelationships between hydrology and ecology in the years to come with the help from the LTER program.

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

From Swimming with Seagrasses to Statistics

vivien February 06, 2013 0

Somewhere down the road ecology evolved from this:

To something like this:

As a member of the Seagrass Ecosystem Research lab here at Florida International University I am, by default, a researcher in two long-term monitoring projects. The first is the FCE-LTER seagrass monitoring project and the other is a seagrass monitoring project in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Both datasets have resulted in mounds and mounds of data throughout the years. As a side project to my dissertation I arrogantly decided to conquer said data mounds and turn out some ground-breaking revelations about benthic community structure in South Florida. There's just one problem: I am buried in MOUNDS of data! To analyze these data, it turned out, would be much more complicated than just getting the R code (R is a stats program that hates me, but it's free so I put up with the abuse!) correct so the program will tell me what I want to know. Here is the first figure I generated from this dataset:

Figure 1: R-plot, or as my friend Rob put it, "It looks like a unicorn threw up on your computer." Thanks Rob!

Somehow, R did not tell me what I wanted to know, nor did it write up a nice paper for me to publish. My purpose in generating the first plot was to see if there was any relationships in community structure (species densities) at different regions of the FKNMS (denoted by the 8 different symbols) over time (different colored symbols). The answer was simple: No. While pretty, this figure shows me that there isn't much of a difference among years or across regions for this set of years (I have data for every year beginning in 1996). Where are my ground-breaking results?!

This lack of a relationship is good for the seagrass and macroalgae. However, it has forced me to use my brain in ways in which I was not accustomed. It has spurred me in a different direction with this dataset, though....AND, it's exciting! I'm still in the exploratory stages of the analysis but I'm finding some interesting results. Herein lies the beauty of both long-term datasets and statistics. I am, by no means, a stats whiz - I really struggle with the topic sometimes and throughout my master's degree I threatened the life of my computer, R, and all South Texas seagrasses at one point or another. Though I haven't found anything ground-breaking yet, the sheer amount of data I have at my fingertips allows me to investigate new hypotheses. The benefits are two-fold: 1) I will never be the person who can read a stats book and apply the analysis years down the road. I need the practice - like riding a bike - and with this dataset I get that much needed practice. 2) I get to train my brain to think outside the box and be creative...with MATH! That I enjoy the mathematical brain massage has shocked me.

Tags # FKNMS # Jenn Sweatman # LTER Continue Reading

Thursday, December 6, 2012

The FCE rolls on . . .

vivien December 06, 2012 0

"Nothing endures but change." -- Heraclitus

It is indeed a time of change for the FCE LTER graduate students. One of our own, Ann Hijuelos, Trexler lab master's student and blog founder, successfully defended her thesis and has moved on to greener pastures (a real job in Baton Rouge, LA). On behalf of all of us here at the blog, I thank Ann for her leadership and wish her well in all future endeavors. In the power vacuum that resulted from Ann's departure, Jenn Sweatman, Fourqurean lab PhD student, has forcefully taken the reins of the blog and we can only hope that she is a kind and benevolent master. I am very confident that Jenn will lead us to new heights of blogitude! Also, thanks to the fearless leadership of Dr. Evelyn Gaiser and the hard work of many other FCE contributors, our NSF grant has been renewed for another six years in the amount of $5.88 million! This grant renewal ensures that vital FCE research will continue until at least 2018, and a new crop of graduate students will have the support necessary to pursue fascinating scientific projects in the Everglades for years to come. Let's make the next six years as great and productive as the last 12!

Tags # Adam Rosenblatt # Everglades # LTER Continue Reading

Friday, September 21, 2012

Epiphanies in Ecology

vivien September 21, 2012 0

For Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) research in the Seagrass Ecosystems Lab, we venture out into Florida Bay every two months to do a survey of the submerged aquatic vegetation (seagrasses and macroalgae). As I mentioned in my last post (Florida Bay: Beneath the Surface) Florida Bay is a honeycomb of basins, which creates different habitat types. These different habitats, specifically the type and density of vegetation on the floor and sediment type (and many other factors that are beyond the scope of this post), attribute to the color of the water. In a single LTER trip, we see water ranging from deep blue to teal, green, and even brown! After 2 years of running the LTER project for our lab, I am still amazed by the dynamic nature of Florida Bay on the surface and below.

Darker blue waters as we travel to Sprigger Bank.

At Sprigger Bank: notice the greenish patch to the left. There is sparse shoal grass (Halodule wrightii) in that patch. The darker areas have turtle grass (Thalassia testudinum) and manatee grass (Syringodium filiforme).

Milky teal waters of Duck Key.

Duck Key on a different day.

Little Madiera a week after TS Isaac passed through. Little Madiera is located near mainland Florida and receives a lot of freshwater input, especially after a major storm like Isaac.

During my first year as a PhD student, these LTER trips were pivotal in maintaining my sanity and reminding me of the reasons I became an ecologist. As I have developed as a scientist, these trips have become more of a gateway for the development of research questions to test different theoretical concepts that we have studied in depth in our classes. I’m a very visual person and being outside helps me to connect the dots between theory and the development of research questions. I guess you could say, nature is my muse (sorry for the cliché but I really couldn't resist!). For the most part, major discoveries in science have been made rather serendipitously. I have come up with many research questions while being on the LTER and, needless to say, I am not the only scientist who does this. See a great example of what may have started as an ecological epiphany in Science Magazine. I can only hope that when I grow up my epiphanies will be published in such high-impact journals as Science or Nature! Until then...

Tags # Florida Bay # Grad Student Life # Jenn Sweatman Continue Reading

Monday, September 10, 2012

Sea-level research at 8000 feet

vivien September 10, 2012 0

In continuation of Ann’s post a couple weeks back, conferences and meetings are very important in becoming a successful and knowledgeable graduate student. Currently, I am in Estes Park, Colorado, which is about 1.5 hours outside Denver and adjacent to Rocky Mountain National Park for the Long-Term Ecological Research All-Scientists Meeting. In a nut-shell, this meeting is held once every three years and brings together scientists and researchers from 26 LTER sites around the country and around the world. This meeting differs from a conference by being primarily focused on cross-site and interdisciplinary collaboration. This is done by holding working group discussion sessions surrounding a particular topic. Scientist that are interested in that topic can participate in a discussion session that has a specific outcome; typically information exchange, brainstorming, or a product such as data analysis or a journal article.

Map of all 26 LTER sites

The working group sessions that are held at a meeting are typically selected by way of a request for proposals. This request is sent to the general scientist community, in this case the LTER community. Researchers will then submit a proposal of the session that they want to hold; including the purpose of the session, the importance, and the potential outcome of the session. This LTER ASM meeting, I had the opportunity to submit a proposal that was accepted by the LTER group that focused on graduate student research in research topics related to hydrology, or how water interacts with the environment. The LTER community has been promoting collaboration between researchers at different sites and between different fields of study. Because of this and my own interests in scientific collaboration, I contacted two graduate students to help co-organize this meeting with me; one from the Everglades/ FCE LTER group and one from the Arctic (ARC) LTER. Additionally, we invited 9 other graduate students from 8 separate LTER sites, spanning tropical to desert conditions, and coastal to inland environments and a wide range of topics from nutient cycling to water flows. You can view some of the presentations from our working group session here.

The reason why we put this session together was to identify relationships between nature and society among the various LTER sites that are inherently linked by water. The 26 LTER sites represent sites that have long-term datasets and allow scientists to look at environment and societal changes over ecological timescales on the orders of years and decades. Long-term data is important, because some of the processes that occur in nature take longer than the few years that a student might be at school doing their research.

In addition to the workshops, we still hold a poster session to highlight the research that we have been working on. I will have my poster up during the meeting to show off my remote sensing research (see earlier blog post). Essenitally I will be presenting how we can use satellite data to measure chloride concentrations and evapotranspiration (evaporation + transpiration). You can read through my abstract here.

These meetings are great opportunities to interact with other graduate students, faculty and researchers that conduct similar research and to learn about what cutting edge research is going on in other parts of the country and world. Additionally, the LTER meetings do a really good job of promoting collaboration and camaraderie between graduate students and faculty by holding social events and field trips. And it’s pretty hard to pass up a field trip to Rocky Mountain National Park. With that, I will leave you with some pictures from the conference.

Cheers,

Graduate Student Mixer- Great opporutnity to meet other great grad students from around the states

Graduate Student Symposium at LTER ASM

View of the Rocky Mountains from the front of our housing

View from our back patio

Tags # Conferences # David Lagomasino # Evapotranspiration Continue Reading