Hello! My name is Suhn Brown and I am a 2019 Oregon Sea Grant Summer Scholar! I have just finished my fourth week of the 10 weeks that I will be here on the Oregon coast working with the Oregon Coastal Management Program.

I have been staying in Newport at the Hatfield Marine Science Center dorms! I have five roommates here in one of the  , which has been a challenge to get used to with the limited space. We all get along great so far and have a lot of fun hanging out playing video games or just noodling around playing guitar together.

Living in Newport has been such a blast!! I love walking around and exploring the town. It’s so cool and different from anywhere I have ever been. The people are so nice, and the temperate weather is incredible. Being so close to the ocean is definitely one of the bigger pluses, as well! I haven’t had the chance to live on a coast before, and I’m absolutely in love with it. I have spent many hours at the beach and would never leave if it were up to me! There are so many cool things to do here, but one of my favorites so far was getting a library card!

With the Oregon Coastal Management Program, I am helping my mentor, Meg Reed, with the Oregon King Tides Photo Initiative! The OR king tides project is a citizen science project where we have any number of volunteers take photos of the king tides—ultra-high high tides in the winter—and submit them to us with the location, time, orientation, and date that the photo was taken, so we can use GIS to map photos through all the past 9 seasons of the project. The main goal of the project is to record this data so that we can achieve a better understanding of climate change on the Oregon coast. Because this is the 10^th season, I am creating a visual display that will be celebrating and highlighting the successes of the past 9 seasons and educating Oregonians on the effects of climate change on the Oregon coast via the king tides project. That’s been the main focus of the project, but I’ve also undertaken increasing our social media outreach. I think that the best way that we can increase the both the measure and quality of our data is by showcasing some of the more useful pictures that we’ve received and by letting more people know who we are and what we’re doing.

It’s been so incredible and heart-warming working under the umbrella of Oregon’s Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD). Everyone there is so passionate about what they do and about preserving the land of Oregon. It has probably been the most refreshing part about being a part of this internship. I am so thankful for this opportunity and the people I have met so far along the way.

Until next time, sea ya!