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Emory WellmanThe next series of blog posts will be about Emory's internship in the Gulf of Mexico with US EPA and Mississippi State University in the lab of Dr. Eric Sparks. Site Visits How do cities or companies interested in living shorelines get the ball rolling on projects which can protect their waterfront? Often, the first step is a site visit! I just went on my second site visit since being in Mississippi and it turns out they’re a lot of fun. Both of these began either with a local official (the Mayor of Biloxi – the man in the black jacket pointing) or the Safety Director of a chemical plant reaching out to local experts, including my supervisor, Dr. Eric Sparks (in camo). Site visits are fun because they’re essentially an ecological engineering brainstorming session – you tramp out to the shoreline and poke around, identifying native and non-native vegetation, trying to spot oysters or other bivalves, and hypothesizing about the degree to which the shoreline is changing based on Google Earth time lapse photos and the height of the marsh scarp. Site visits are also a great time to bring out the drone to collect high-quality aerial imagery, onto which you can map potential plantings or marsh sills. Site visits are a highly productive way to get out of the office and interact with coastal stakeholders! Wave Gauges The severity of boat wakes and wind waves can make or break the success of an oyster, seagrass, or marsh restoration project. However, the sensors required to collect wave energy data are often extremely expensive and therefore not frequently used. Wave energy plays a big role in my work so I have been very excited to learn how to build do-it-yourself wave gauges at the Sparks Lab. These gauges are built entirely from materials bought at Home Depot or computer parts websites, for a fraction of the price of the typical wave gauge. Though not necessarily difficult, the gauges require A LOT of steps and very precise work. The hardest thing for me was learning how to use a soldering iron. It’s a steep learning curve but a lot of fun, and I am happy to report that I have only seriously burned myself once. Here you can see the completed top portion of a gauge – the small white circle within the red square is the only portion of the instrument which will be exposed to water, and is actually a very sensitive membrane that calculates the pressure exerted on it by passing waves. Next up: trying to learn how to code using Arduino! CE Field Work in the GBNERR Do clonal plants “decide” how to best use their limited resources as they grow? Research by Dr. Valerie Reijers in the Netherlands indicates that grasses growing in sand dunes do, and marsh plants might as well. I set out to test this in a different system – namely a salt marsh at the Grand Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve (GBNERR) in Moss Point, MS. Here, drought has led to the formation of salt pannes, into which black needlerush (Juncus roemerianus) is slowly growing back. With the help of folks from Mississippi State University (MSU) and GBNERR, we very carefully clipped needlerush shoots and replaced each with a pin, like you’d use in quilting. I then photographed these pinned plants, and we excavated the sediment to expose the rhizomes connecting the shoots. In the “After” picture, ALL of those little dots are the heads of pins. With these photos and the knowledge of how the plants connect, I can (theoretically) upload these photos into MATLAB and use Dr. Reijers’ code to assess the distances between shoots and therefore gain insight into the plants’ “priorities.” Wish me luck! Comments are closed.
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