By Adrienne Breef-Pilz, Guest Writer Earlier, our lab wrote a post about working in the GTMNERR where we are looking at nonconsumptive effects on oyster reefs. Additionally, we are collecting data on the survival and the growth of the oysters at nine different sites within the reserve. We do this by looking at how oysters…
Category: How’s the water?
Teambuilding in Tallahassee: Where do our samples go?
Hey there, it’s been awhile. Many of you know how summer field seasons go – in the blink of an eye, that’s how! It feels like just yesterday we were planning for the upcoming summer of our own monitoring as well as assisting visiting scientists conducting their research at the Reserve. Alas, time flew and…
Water Quality in the Guana Ecosystem
By Nikki Dix, Shannon Dunnigan, and Silas Tanner Another great reason to love working at a NERR is that we operate at so many levels. We have national, regional, and local programs that steer our research, education, and stewardship of the estuaries within our boundaries. Many of the projects we work on here at the…
Take two!
By Shannon Dunnigan Don’t ever be afraid to ask for help. When our water quality housing broke [again] at our San Sebastian site (remember when we talked about replacing that darn thing??) in January, we threw in the towel and asked for help in making that station better. Clearly, after breaking for a second time in…
Swip Swap
By Shannon Dunnigan Don’t you hate it when things break? Us, too. We have been noticing signs that one of our SWMP water quality stations was likely broken for a few weeks. Also praying, at the same time, that our suspicions were wrong-they weren’t (did you see our beard post??). Our San Sebastian SWMP station…
How Madison got started
The following is a post from a guest writer to the NERRds! This is the first in a series about an investigation into the effects of sunscreen on oysters conducted by Madison Toonder. Madison is a 10th grader from FL who attends Stanford University Online High School. She aspires to be an exotic/marine animal veterinarian…
Re-Coding Our Data Files
By Katie Petrinec Let me begin with where we left off last… After realizing that our dataset contained turbidity values that exceed 1000 NTUs. We realized that further steps were needed in preparing the data before we could begin any sort of analyses. If we were noticing these patterns in the turbidity data, what about…
From Big Data to Big Picture…An Introduction to Sentinel Sites
By Pam Marcum Our long-term monitoring programs collect a lot of data and it is very easy to get lost sifting through it all during analysis. There are millions of small questions that we can answer and specific patterns we can pick out, but what about the ‘bigger picture’ questions? Questions like “What ecological response…
Our sonde grew a beard
By Shannon Dunnigan Biofouling can be a bunch of things…aggravating, gross, stinky, harmful, disastrous, interesting, impressive, but also comical. We retrieved one of our data loggers (sondes) from the field this week that looked like it had gone and grown a beard. Bryozoans are generally the main culprit in the biofouling of our sondes (along…
Understanding Our Data Files
By Katie Petrinec For the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to really delve into our SWMP data with the goal of providing a 10-year analysis of SWMP data [almost] since the program’s inception at the GTMNERR. Analyses of the SWMP datasets are necessary to identify estuarine impacts of events like hurricanes or prolonged droughts,…
Why oysters?
By Silas Tanner, Nikki Dix, Pam Marcum, & Shannon Dunnigan Long-term monitoring of oyster populations is a big project at the GTM. If you have driven over any of the bridges in northeast Florida at low tide, you know how expansive our oyster reefs are. Here locally we have intertidal oyster reefs, which means that…
It’s all about the little things
By Shannon Dunnigan “Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things“ -Robert Brault, 1985 Today, is about equipment…toys, gear, instruments, really any name you would like to call them. In some cases, they are just instruments we use to measure particular parameters, such as the temperature of…
What is SWMP?
By Shannon Dunnigan For over a decade the GTM Research Reserve has been monitoring seasonal changes in water quality at four stations (Pine Island, San Sebastian, Fort Matanzas, and Pellicer Creek) found within the Tolomato, Matanzas, and Pellicer Creek estuaries as part of the National Estuarine Research Reserve’s (NERRs) System-Wide Monitoring Program (SWMP). The goal…
NERRds on the Water 