ODFW Adventures: Part II
Hello again! After having made it through my second week at ODFW in this unfamiliar job I have been given, I am starting to gain my bearings and understand a little bit better what I am expected to accomplish before I pack up my bags and return to studying in the dreary depths of the Mark O. Hatfield Library at Willamette University. Continued from last week, I counted more herring egg samples at what has become my second desk inside the chem. Lab. With the CV calculations I explained at the end of last week’s blog continuing to be high for most samples, I counted out all 30 subsamples in frustration due to the knowledge that I could theoretically have counted out three whole samples in that time frame. Yet on Friday I allowed myself to count the rest of the bagged samples I have left inside the freezer, and realized that after having counted 11 samples I only have 10 left to go!
As for my place on the Nearshore Strategy team, I am still finding my niche. Our weekly meeting on Wednesday still swirled my brain to muck with all of the unfamiliar details of our work being avidly discussed by my other team members. I was disappointed after the 2 hour meeting that I still felt lost in the project, and still having several questions about the draft outline for our document on climate change, I followed Aly into her office with my questions. Being extremely helpful as she always is, Aly discussed my questions with me and called in Delia, the creator of the outline, to expand the discussion. Although this impromptu second meeting set my stomach grumbling as lunch was delayed an hour and a half, I walked out of the office with access to new reading materials that would guide me through the discussions at our normal meetings and the job of finding sources for our upcoming climate change document research, along with a new sense of purpose.
Alongside these two main “events” of my week, I spent time doing small projects and assignments to keep myself occupied. Using a list of scientific names, I attempted to search for the common names of these species (trust me, this was a lot harder than it sounds!) and proudly found all but 14 of them, I read more, more, and MORE documents (I suspect this will be a popular theme during the rest of my internship), helped clean the chem. Lab with another co-worker (which was judged to not have been cleaned for the last 30 years or so—definitely a good use of my time!), and began going over some basic GIS training that was found on the ODFW website. Although the powerpoint slides I went through taught me a lot of basic terms of GIS and its main purposes and abilities in map-making, I still find myself lost with this incredible software.
Based on this week’s list of work and achievements, I will continue diligently counting samples next week in the lab, read through the sources I have already found for the climate change document to learn about ocean issues related to climate change and sort the documents into categories for the rest of my team’s convenience, and hopefully go through several more forms of GIS training to help me understand this immense resource for future use. Wish me luck!
Good luck! So what kinds of sources are you finding to help prepare the document? Are they peer-reviewed articles, technical documents, or something else entirely? And what are you learning about climate change and the Nearshore Strategy? Oh, and did I mention, GOOD LUCK, Lauren!!
Most of the articles are peer-reviewed journal articles, but some are crazy government documents, mostly written by NOAA, that I have had trouble trying to cite as a reference. I have been learning that climate change is more complex than I thought–there are so many impact types out there that only a few people are writing about, yet they are just as important as the next impact type! For example, the changes in freshwater rivers such as turbidity and salinity have huge and potentially devestating impacts on the local estuary and ocean, such as a change in the salinity of the ocean and estuary that can be detrimental to local species.