Spring Break Week

The week of spring break was mostly relaxing. I mainly just looked at my camera pictures and made sure that most were legible. I believe that I do need to let my cameras sit and collect more data in the field. For some reason during my second SD card collection, pre-impact 2 did not collect a single picture. I checked in field during collection day if the camera was working, and the camera and SD card both worked when I manually made it collect a photo. I have no idea why it did not work. It may be something with the auto feature. I would like to go out sometime this weekend and make sure all my cameras are still operating and the battery life is good. The battery percent in Pre-impact 2 was significantly lower compared to other sites (64% i to 88%) when I checked over spring break. So far the only problems with my camera data are: Control first round SD only collected one photo, and Pre-impact 2 second round SD collected zero.

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Kyle Sliger/Joshua Hines 

3/30/14

7:00am-10:00am

Today, Josh and I finished up our point count surveys for birds. We found a few more species than we did last time we went out. However, there still seems to be more diversity/abundance (as expected) within the control and pre-impacted sites 1 &2 when compared to the degraded site of the bayou. It was a little chilly and foggy this morning but as soon as the sun came up, the fog cleared as the morning was very nice for bird activity. Also, to all those who thought there to be no fish in the White Oak Bayou wetlands; Josh and I saw a 30 pound Drum swimming through in only 8-10 inches of water at the control site. We also saw a beaver while we were at the pre-impact site #2 and a few deer grazing at the degraded site. Sadly, we also found at pre-impact #2 that someone had shot one of our cameras for studying hydrology. I guess that's the risk you have to take when you have to leave them out there. All in all, it was a fantastic day to spend in the White Oak Bayou

Week of 03/17

Grace Kellner
On Wednesday this week, we met to look over our data and prepare our spreadsheets so that we can start analyzing our data. I always forget how much more difficult this is than I think it will be. I have mine set up and half of my data entered. Alyson and I also worked with Pathfinder to try and transfer our points into ArcMap. She got all but three of her points, which is good, but also a little worrisome because it could cause problems if everybody is missing a few points.  I had intended to transfer my points in the GIS lab in Burdick on Thursday, but it turns out that Pathfinder hasn't been re installed on the master computer in there yet this semester, so I will try to do it when we get back from spring break.

On Friday, Ali and I went out to transfer her SD cards in the cameras. It was a wonderful day to be outside, although a touch warm. Alyson let us use her camera to make sure the pictures all worked. Unfortunately, the Sample 2 site had no pictures at all on the SD card. This could definitely be a problem for Ali. We were out there from 1:45 to about 3:45 and we visited all sites. When we got back, we helped Alyson pick through some of her macroinvertebrate samples. I vaguely remember doing this in Ecology many semesters ago, but it was fun for me to relearn how to do it and get some practice doing it. We also got to help Kyle and Josh with their samples, although there were a few unfortunate technical difficulties. It was really interesting to me to know what everyone else was doing and get experience in a variety of activities.

6 Week Summer Opportunity VT

I'm applying to the Middlebury School of the Environment six week summer program which is in Vermont. I found out about this at my conference. The deadline for applications has already passed but they have open spots and funding available, so admission is rolling. Information on the program, the course, and applications can be found at www.middlebury.edu/environment.

I know some of you have families or summer plans already, but it's a great opportunity, and if I get accepted I'm going to do it. I think the dates are June 20-August 1. You have to mail in a transcript and you need two letters of recommendation that have to be signed by yourself the applicant and mailed in as well. And then the financial aid application has to be mailed in. If you're considering applying, don't consider long because when the spots are gone, they're gone. 

-Grace

Productive Week

On Friday Dr. Entrekin sat down with me in the lab and taught me how to identify my samples. It was so helpful and I am so appreciative for her help. Even though I still have a lot of samples left it seems way more manageable. She was able to give me helpful hints and had me look at the bigger picture which really helped me to grasp what I was doing. I was really worried about my topic but after working on it I now love it and I am absolutely in love with this project. A special thanks you Ali and Kyle for helping pick samples. Y’all are lifesavers!

Pics from Friday

Busy Busy Bee(s)

Trying to keep this post short and simple because a lot has happened in the last six days.

Friday- I went out in the field with Gray and Grace, I felt kind of useless at first, all I could really do was mark trees for plots. Like Grace said, I did enjoy learning about trees though! I was surprised how easy it is to identify some trees just by the bark, branches, and what's laying on the ground near the tree. I took some good candid pictures while the other two were being productive with data collection.

Sunday- After I got off work, Alyson and I went to the lab and picked through some of her samples. It was like I was back in the saddle again from when I did that for Mandy Bates. I always enjoy picking samples, it's like a puzzle! I think Alyson needs everyone to help when they can, even if they can only do one/two samples. She's doing a great job but she still has to ID and analyze in order to get her data!

Tuesday- Steve Polaskey helped Josh and I with NH4 sampling. We realized that NH4 is a butt. Not only are the reagents used for the analytical techniques SUPER toxic, but after all the samples are prepped, we have to let them sit in the dark for a minimum of SIX HOURS! So after everything was prepped and set up, we decided we were done for the day.

Wednesday- So we ran our samples, and we realized that we are going to have to run them all over again. You know you messed something up when all 7 of your standards read the same value. We assumed that we would need to dilute our samples down to 10% of the original because our spec only reads to 84 ug/L and according to Allyn's results, ammonium averages were in a range from 100-650 ug/L. Now we know that was a silly idea, and we also know somewhere along the lines we really messed up our standards and we need to re-make our stock solution. I don't know if I believe the instructions' metrics so i'll be double checking that before we make more. Anywho, it was a great learning experience.

Wednesday Night- The Steering Committee met today. From what I was able to attend, I feel like they are really happy with where they have gotten. They have identified areas based on their necessity to be conserved. They also want to focus on the wetland areas that are heavily forested because apparently the CORP doesn't have any regulations on timber harvesting in wetlands. One thing I did notice in the meeting is that there is an education gap between the residents and the scientists. One resident north of Maumelle was the prime example of that. He kept voicing his concern about flooding in his town, and how he thought the best action would be to dig a ditch within the white oak creek to alleviate some of this backup. We all tried to educate him that managing the wetland and preserving other parts would solve his flooding problem somewhat, but as long as development continues, the flooding in his neighborhood will worsen. He still didn't understand. We need to figure out a simple way to communicate to the residents that digging ditches is counterproductive.

Update about class

Well, things are going swimmingly. Please take advantage of some of the posted volunteer opportunities. There is a tire pick up event on Saturday in Arkadelphia. A good cause and also a way to interact with professionals at the Arkansas Heritage Commission.

I went to Maumelle Middle School yesterday and viewed the students poster with data and pictures along with their summary and project goal (to organize a clean up). I want to say that Kell, Alyson, and Ali have done an excellent job helping them with their project! Really well done and they appreciate the help a lot.  They will be heading to their conference next week, so we won't be visiting until after spring break. We would like to help them with their camera, help organize the trash clean up, and go out and sample with them using your tools - especially the bugs, birds, and amphibians. They are at a great site and I think doing some biotic sampling would be great.

Today, March 12, many students will be attending the Steering Committee meeting to inform the group of their projects. I will be in class to help anyone with data. Friday, I need you all to let me know what you need help with. I can go in the field or be in lab to help with data entry. Please let me know.

So glad that you are all on track with your data collection. Enjoy the lovely spring weather!

Opportunity for trail walk

As many of you already know, we are planning two wetland field trips this
month. Our first wetland walk will be THIS SATURDAY, March 15th at 10 a.m.
We'll meet at the end of Vestal Boulevard. Our next trip will be Saturday,
March 29th at 10 a.m.at the Maumelle Wetland Trail. I've attached more
information and location maps for each event.

These tours are a wonderful (free!) way to enjoy and learn more about the
wetlands found right in the local watershed. If you need any additional
information or have questions, please feel free to contact me at either of
the numbers listed below..

I'd also just like to remind any of you who may be interested that we are
holding a Steering Committee meeting tomorrow at 3 p.m. in the South Room
at the Jess Odom Community Center at 1100 Edgewood Drive. We hope to have
as much community involvement as possible in the White Oak Bayou Wetland
Management project!

We hope to see you at one of our upcoming meetings or trips!

Allyn Fuell

Week of 03/03

Grace Kellner

On Wednesday we had current biology graduate student guest speakers come talk to applying to graduate school, what graduate school is like in biology, and what to expect.

On Friday, most of us were out in the field. Myself, Ali, and Gray worked together in the control site from 1:45 to around 4:00. We got all three of our points finished at the site and I am now completely finished collecting data. Turns out Dr. Entrekin was right and I didn't need to freak out about not having enough time in the field. Allyn and my dad were good teachers.

It was really wet in the area, but it was actually pretty interesting because if we stood still we could see an obvious flow of the water receding. Walking back after taking our samples we all noticed that the path had less standing water in it than it did when we walked in a few hours before. As far as identifying trees, I have definitely learned a how to identify the dominant species in this area: white oak, overcup oak, willow oak, shagbark hickory, post oak, and green ash. Although there were very few shagbarks, I can tell if the tree is a hickory or not depending on the size of the terminal buds. I think Ali liked helping and learning too and she even identified an ash! We definitely had fun taking our samples and we also helped Gray do some of his HGM assessment. Now we have to analyze our data and continue to work on our proposal and begin work on our final report and presentation.

Alyson, was not in the field with us because she already has all of her samples and it would be a poor use of her time to be out with us when she needed to be identifying her samples, so she stayed in the lab to do that.

I'm impressed with how quickly everything has come together. Two weeks ago I was convinced it would take everybody at least four to six weeks to get all of our samples, but I am finished, Alyson is finished (collecting, not identifying), and Josh has finished collecting his samples. We got some pictures in the field as well. I have an image of a tree that I was not sure of, and Ali took pictures of us working.

I will not be in class this coming week and will also miss the Steering Committee meeting because I'll be out of town for a conference.

Meeting the kiddos:

Alyson and I were able to go help with the Maumelle Middle School EAST kids today. We are currently helping them on a poster/video presentation for the EAST conference in two weeks as well as a powerpoint presentation for the city of Maumelle (I believe). In the beginning we hashed out what things needed to be done now, and what needed to be put off until after the conference. The kids know what they are doing data wise, but are unclear as to WHY they are doing these things. I was able to talk to the kids about the importance of bar graphs, standard error, and why dissolved oxygen is so important in a wetland. Looking at their raw data, I felt that it would be best if we went out once or twice more with the kids and collected readings with them. It is very skewed in some places, and then uniform in others. We talked to Candy about splitting the kids up when we go back on Tuesday and taking a few out to sample while the rest work on the project.

Below is what we sketched out for the kids.

• My (VERY ROUGH) explanation of DO
• Poster setup for conference
• What they need to work on for next time/ data analysis 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Getting things done:

Today Ali and I went to talk to the 8^th graders at Maumelle Middle. I think we made some good progress but there is still a lot to do before their conference. We started the day by giving each of the kids a topic that they will be responsible for. The boys are going to look at 4 weeks of camera data which includes 5 pictures per-day (9-3). The three girls are going to split dissolved oxygen, pH, turbidity, and temperature. Then I took two sheets of paper and one for the conference, and one for their meeting and we broke down what needed to be done for both. For the conference they need to establish a goal/objective, write a 6 sentence summary, and change their movie trailer to a video so they can slow it down and add more substance. They are supposed to have an objective and rough draft of their paper ready for us next Tuesday. For the meeting they are each going to cover their topic in a power point. As a group they will talk about their goal and what their hopes are.  After we nailed this stuff down the boys started looking at the pictures, Ali helped scout with excel and graphs and I sat with the other two girls and we talked about their data and things they had questions about. I think we got a lot accomplished today but there is still so much to do. They are hoping that we will go out to their sample site and collect another turbidity and DO with them, also they want to get some picture of us working with them. Next week since there are more of us going I feel like it might be a good idea for us to divide and concur but I am willing to do what Dr. Entrekin thinks is best. I was thinking a group could go out with them and take the samples and a group can help them with going over their summary for the conference.  

Steering committee meeting March 12th from 3 to 4:30

See email below from Allyn: 
 
Steering committee meeting is Wednesday, March 12^th from 3 to 4:30 in the same place as the TAC meeting. It would be so wonderful if the students could come talk about their projects.

Fieldwork Friday 02/28 and Saturday 03/01

Grace Kellner
We did not have class on Wednesday of this week, but I went to the meeting on Tuesday. On Friday, everybody was out in the field either collecting samples or collecting data from about 2:00 to 5:00. Allyn Fuell was there to help myself and Gray with our HGM plots and to help me get a handle on tree identification. The first plot took about an hour to complete once we got it set up. There were only a few dominant species in that plot. Then we set up a second plot in a more bottomland area and that one only took about 45 minutes to do. The rest of the groups had moved on to different locations, so we went to see when they were and when they were leaving. We had just enough time to set up a plot in the degraded area. Gray's HGM assessment only took a few seconds because most of his data was 0 and mine was a lot faster as well because Allyn helped identify the number of different grass and forb species in a square meter plot.

Saturday morning a group went out early to collect data. I went out later with my father (a biologist at ATU) and Allyn. Everything went a lot faster because I knew how to set up the plots and could identify the species more easily. My dad and I did the last plot in the Sample 1 location, the last two in the degraded, and all three in the sample 2 location. Allyn was only able to come out for the latter part of our trip, but helped us identify two tree species that I of course didn't know and my dad was unsure about. She also took samples of some of the grasses back with her so she could identify the species for me. I feel like I can do the rest of the points on my own as long as I have a guidebook to help me with the difficult species. It might also be interesting to come back once the trees have leaves on them at the end of the semester to sample again to see if our identifications without leaves were accurate. In total, on Saturday I was in the field from 2:00 to 5:30.

Crazy week!

Alyson Stepina
week of Feb 24-28

This was a very busy week. It started out Tuesday morning when Dr. Entrekin, Kell and I went to Maumelle Middle school. We were able to meet with the middle school kids for the first time. We were able to talk to them and try and figure out their ultimate goal and teach them some things about the data they were collecting. We spent a lot of time talking about turbidity and the importance of it. We were also able to talk to them about our project which was exciting. After our visit the three of us decided that it would be good to come up with some back ground questions for them to answer before we went back again. Our plan is to go back this Thursday and go over those questions and start to work on their presentation boards.

Tuesday night I went to the Conway watershed meeting Josh and Grace were also there. During the meeting the official name was decided, Lake Conway Point Removed Watershed Alliance. They started the meeting with a recap so we were able to understand where they were. The UA representative went over a 9-element plan and what it was. Then we were numbered off and did group activity. Each group was supposed to decide what they wanted the watershed to look like in 15 years and what some of their concerns were. Somehow because I was the youngest they made me be the person to write and speak for the group. The five things my group came up with were: water depth, flood control, vegetation removal/ balance, recreation, renewed interest (game and fish commission, public, and other organizations). Next we went over the different types of exec boards that the group could have. A committee was made to construct a mission statement and potentially come up with some bi-laws to go over at the next meeting. The next meeting will occur on March 25^th at 6pm at the nature resource center. It was very interesting to see the steps that you have to go through to start up an organization like this.

Friday the whole class went out to collect samples. Allyn came out to help Grace and Grey with HGM and Dr. Entrekin helped Josh, Ali and I with collecting our samples. Friday went well we were able to collect samples from the degraded site and pre-impact 1. Since Kyle could not collect his bird data he helped me collect my data since it takes a lot of hands! At the degraded site we ran into problems finding the different categories we were using so we ended up omitting a category.

Saturday morning Josh and I met on campus at 6:30 and gathered all of our supplies. Then we met Kyle at the end of the road to collect the bird data. We went to all four sites and did 10 minute counts for the birds. It was interesting that even though all of our sites are relatively close they each had a different species that was predominate. Then at the control and the pre-impact 2 we changed the cameras for Ali. Kyle stayed and helped us collect samples t the control which was nice because Josh and I both need two sets of hands. After the control we went back to pre-impact 2 and collected samples there. We did the water quality first and then my macroinvertebrates. Josh and I helping each other help to make sure that we did not muck up each other’s water since we both need the water to not be disturbed before we take our samples. Collecting was a really good experience other than when I fell in the water. It was nice to actually go out and experience collecting after we have talked about the processes for so long. All together it was a very busy week but I think it was very successful.

This next week we will go back to the middle school as well as start to analyze our data in the lab and see what we actually have.