Week Eight

First off, I'd like to say I'm shocked we're already halfway through the semester! 

It feels like we began Semester By the Bay two weeks ago, and already we've begun working on drafting our posters so the end of the year's presentations will run more smoothly. 

Collecting materials to conduct our experiments for Exploration Ecology (my project being on microplastics, as discussed in last week's blog) has begun! I am currently re-reading and re-reading the Ocean Diagnostics Saturna (2023) User Manual (version 1.0). I hope that by next week, sterilized mason jars and lids will be prepped so I can visit the Mariner's Park/Doyon property site, collect samples, and test out the imagery software Ocean Diagnostics' Saturna tool provides. It should be able to sort and quantify microplastics, as well as measure their diameter and more. This will allow me to save so much time in the lab. 

I was frustrated to not find a visual aid online that could help me get a better picture of where wastewater effluent discharge spots are in the Cook Inlet area (for my Conservation Biology BIOL 473 literature review), and it was difficult to translate the areas I'd selected for my microplastics research without GPS coordinates. I'd been in person, but it's different seeing that space in a two-dimensional representation on a computer screen. 

So, after collecting countless documents and spending a lot of time measuring my laptop screen and converting permit figures to the pixels on my screen, I have begun my journey with ArcGIS! Linked below is the map I have created for both projects, along with some of the information that is crucial for each site. I would love to use last week's aforementioned study by Dr. Mark Johnson to overlay a visual of Cook Inlet and Kachemak Bay circulation, and add more effluent sites (such as commercial fisheries processing areas, airports, more wastewater treatment facilities, etc.) but for this being my first go at GIS ever, I'm pretty excited (and proud) to have figured enough out to create a site that will hold much of the crucial data for my many SBB projects. 

Let me know what you think of the ArcGIS map, and what else could/should be added! If you'd like any sources, please reach out... I will eventually cite all sources but at the moment, I'm wrapped up with several midterms, and they're all in a folder on my desktop waiting to be cited in my literature review first.