By Alee Knoell Oysters, lately they seem to be the belle of the estuary. But hey, it’s a well deserved title- they do quite a lot! And with oyster monitoring back in full swing, they are getting even more attention here at the reserve. With accessibility often requiring battling nor’easter winds and sinking as low…
Tag: science
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…
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…
Studying loggerhead sea turtle incubation temperatures on Florida panhandle barrier islands
By Megan Lamb, Guest Blogger Did you know that the temperature at which a sea turtle nest incubates will determine if the hatchlings are male or female? This is called temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD) and is very common in reptile species, including alligators, land and sea turtles, and some lizards. Research has shown that the…
A field day with Flagler College
By Shannon Dunnigan This past weekend research and stewardship NERRds at the GTMNERR had a great field day leading Flagler College students out to the GTMNERR’s Wright’s Landing artificial reef site where students assisted in collecting measurements on the percent cover of live oysters and dimensions for each of the 28 individual artificial reefs. …
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…
the wrap up
By Kaitlyn Dietz I think that one of the most important components of an event is the “after wrap-up/ debrief/ collapse in your chair”. The weeks following State of the Reserve have been just a busy as those before the event. We have been reviewing evaluations, summarizing panel discussions, highlighting key parts of presentations and…
The visualization of rain
By Shannon Dunnigan I am sure most of you NERRds can agree that the visualization of data is an integral part of the scientific process. In fact, I would further argue that it does not simply occur ONCE, but multiple times throughout the process. Visualization is a key step in detecting patterns and relationships within…
Dreaming and studying
The following is a guest post from fellow NERRd, Kaitlyn Dietz! You may recognize the name from her Shuck and Tell series this past year on the blog (also, conveniently, her office is 50 steps away from ours). We’re so excited to have her back with another fabulously NERRd-y series on her adventures working with…
The DRY side of Hurricane Irma
The effects of Hurricane Irma were felt across the entire state of Florida. I mean, she WAS huge… “It’s eye…is wide enough that peak winds could arrive at both sides of the Florida peninsula at the same time…” – Kevin Loria, Business Insider, Sep. 9, 2017 Which is fascinating in and of itself, but for…
Spat, Life After the Journey
By Mathew Monroe and Nikki Dix For the past few years on the first week of each month with good morning low tides, we have taken a 20-mile boat ride throughout GTM NERR to track settlement of oyster spat. Spat is the stage of an oyster’s life cycle at which the mobile journey as larvae…
What oysters have to say
The following is a post from a guest writer to the NERRds. This is cross-posted from her very own blog, themeanderingscientist.com, which is wonderfully NERRd-y and entertaining-be sure to check it out! Carrie hails from New England where she spent a lot of time as a kid poking around tide pools. It prompted her to…
What’s R?
By Katie Petrinec Let’s recap a little… If you remember from the last post, we left off with editing the historic data files, all files prior to 2007. Using the metadata documents, we recoded all the 2003-2006 data files and added the suspect data flag and appropriate CDMO code to the data file. We then…
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…
It’s always an adventure!
Hi, I’m Bailey, the GTMNERR research intern for summer 2017! A little bit about me – I’m a senior undergraduate Coastal Biology major at the University of North Florida. I am so thankful to be a part of the GTM team this summer, and if you see me around the educational center, I will surely…
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…
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…
Introducing Norm.
By Shannon Dunnigan Happy New Year! We figured we would start this next year by introducing the smallest member of the GTM Research team: Norm. Norm [the NERR gnome] came to us in the winter of 2013 and has been a cheerful companion on our research treks ever since. He has logged many boat days,…
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…
Mangroves, maintenance, monitoring, oh my!
By Shannon Dunnigan This was a very productive week for us here at the GTM. We were finally able to make it out to our weather station on Tuesday; our first trip back since before Hurricane Matthew. We arrived to find that our station not only survived the storm, but had no other damages! Phew!…
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…
the mosquitoes were worth it
By Shannon Dunnigan This past month we visited a sister Reserve located in Sapelo Island, Georgia. The Sapelo Island National Estuarine Research Reserve (SINERR) was officially designated in December of 1976. With our fantastic hosts, SINERR Research Coordinator Rachel Guy and Education Coordinator Adam Mackinnon, we got the royal treatment and were taken on an adventure…
More Hurricane Matthew
By Shannon Dunnigan Hurricane Matthew approaches the northeast Florida coast this morning. The storm continues to pass along the eastern Florida coast just offshore. Presently it is within 20 miles offshore of Daytona Beach, Florida. Winds are around 120 mph, pressure 945 mb, and is moving NNW at 14 mph (weather.com). You can check out…
Enter: Hurricane Matthew
By Shannon Dunnigan “The last, and only, Category 4 hurricane to make landfall anywhere in northeast Florida or the Georgia coast was an 1898 hurricane south of St. Simons Island, Georgia.“ Hurricane Matthew has increased to a category 4 hurricane as it makes it’s way by Freeport, Bahamas. Almost all of Florida’s eastern coastal counties have…
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…
Welcome to NERRds!
Welcome to NERRds on the Water! This blog is about the estuary. That special place where river meets ocean, where tide meets stream, where Harry met Sally…okay, maybe not that last one. Estuaries are bodies of water where rivers meet the sea. It is within these brackish waters (a mix of fresh water draining from…
NERRds on the Water 