By Alee Knoell Welcome, readers, to the first installment of our NERRd-y “Species Spotlight” series! We’re really excited to begin highlighting some of the flora and fauna found within the 74,000+ acres of protected areas of the GTM Research Reserve. Our first species comes from work done on one of our newest long-term monitoring projects:…
Category: On the Platform
Our Changing NERR-borhood
By Gabriela Canas, Guest Writer The GTM is special for many reasons but one that makes it particularly unique is its location. And with great [location] comes great responsibility (thanks, Spiderman). Located right on the boundary between the tropical and temperate zones, our estuary is considered to be an ecotone, or “transitional” zone (think awkward…
Florida Institute of Oceanography visits the GTMNERR again
By Sam Shaw, Guest Writer What is better than walking mangrove transects in the marsh on a hot and sunny day? Walking them on an overcast and rainy day, without a doubt. For this year’s Florida Institute of Oceanography’s Marine Field Studies class, a group of students was able to experience what it takes to conduct…
Slow but steady
By Pam Marcum and Shannon Dunnigan The Research sector has been working hard to install the components of the NERRS Sentinel Site Application Module-1 (SSAM-1). The SSAM-1 project uses water level and elevation to link data from the abiotic monitoring (water quality and weather) and biological monitoring (marsh ecosystem) of the System-Wide Monitoring Program to…
A very crabby summer
By Nikki Dix and Shannon Dunnigan Caitlin Garvey, our summer intern, recently completed an independent research project, “Comparing the Influence of Crabs in Salt Marsh and Mangrove Habitats.” Caitlin was funded by a National Science Foundation grant administered by the University of North Florida. Using pitfall traps, she caught more crabs in salt marshes than…
Monitoring with Florida Institute of Oceanography
By Nikki Dix Participants in Florida Institute of Oceanography’s Marine Field Studies class assisted GTM Research Reserve biologists (yes, us NERRds!) in our annual mangrove monitoring this past May. This is a multi-university intensive marine science course that exposes undergraduate students to each part of the state of Florida. While with the GTM biologists, students…
How do you choose a site?
By Pam Marcum The GTM Research Reserve is almost 74,000 acres spanning from Palm Valley to Palm Coast. That’s a lot of area to cover, so how did we decide where we should focus our Sentinel Site Application Module 1 (SSAM-1)? It started with evaluating what we already had in place. Our System Wide Monitoring…
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…
Through the grass, on the platform
By Shannon Dunnigan “The GTMNERR is biogeographically positioned at an ecotone of two different vegetation habitats…” This past week we conducted our semi-annual emergent vegetation monitoring, or “marsh monitoring” as we typically like to call it. The smooth cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora) is seeding and the temperatures have been slowly dropping, which makes for beautiful field conditions…
NERRds on the Water 