Category Archives: Former scholars

Gathering Content: Week 2

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Hello all! I hope everyone is enjoying their time so far! Before I begin recounting the past week’s events, I would like to introduce myself briefly (I forgot to give a short bio in the last blog post I did).

 

Brief Bio

So, my name is Shealyn Friedrich and I will be a senior next year at Willamette University (a small liberal arts college about 45 minutes from here in Salem, OR) – shout outs to Lauren Dimock! I will spend next year finishing up my Biology major (I have a minor in Spanish), and thesis-ing! I am looking to go into science education, and the outreach aspect of the Oregon Sea Grant Summer Scholars Program is perhaps what drew me in the most. I am looking into doing a year long masters program after undergrad to receive my Masters of Arts in Teaching (MAT), after which point I hope to teach higher level high school biology. I am very excited about this internship with Sea Grant because, although I have had a broad background in biology, I have not yet had an opportunity to get a taste of the marine sciences specifically. This should be a great time, and I’m excited to be contributing to scientific outreach while exploring some of my own untapped interests! On my free time, I enjoy running, writing, and painting among other things.

Last Week’s Progress

This past week I was really able to wrap my head around my project. I feel pretty settled now, and I have a plan as to where I am going with this! My top priority for the website is going to be research feature stories – at least for starters. We want to draw people into this site, and we want to target both policy makers as well as prospective students! I spent the beginning of this week poking around for information on all of the institutes and departments represented in the marine council. From the information I gathered, I made a rather extensive list of potential feature stories. After meeting with Jenna (my mentor), we came to the conclusion that the list would need to be refined. We also agreed that we should schedule a meeting with communications.

I refined my list down to about 5 overarching feature stories, 5 feature stories on graduate students, and 2 features on undergrads (there is so much going on in the marine sciences at OSU!). On Friday, Jenna and I met with Dave Barner and Nick Houtman among others to discuss the website. We created a plan for what the website should look like, and we discussed content as well. According to Dave and Nick, Terra magazine (as well as several other sites) have pre-existing feature stories that we agreed I should use before writing from scratch. After I gather all of the relevant material and begin designing the website, then I will be able to go back and conduct interviews to write pieces that may fill in any gaps that we find. I also had a meeting with Pat Kight (Oregon Sea Grant web communications) to discuss existing resources.

 

This Week’s Plan

Everyone has been so helpful in helping me get on track with this project – I am so grateful! Today I plan to spend some time collecting pre-existing stories and creating a list of features that can be pulled from other sources for the website.  I will also try and create a new template for the website design that adheres to some of the things we discussed in our meeting with Dave and Nick. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I will be taking an all day Drupal training course. Drupal is the web content management system that I will be using to create the website! I anticipate that Friday will consist of picking up where I left off today (Monday)!

 

Hope everyone has a very happy week! Good luck all! Enjoy Oregon!

 

 

 

Learning! |wk.2|

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Hello…

I’m amazed two weeks have gone by! It feels like I just got here because I have finally settled into a routine.

Working at ODFW…

I am gaining some awesome skills here. Mike, my mentor, purchased several Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 training videos/books and so far they have been super helpful. I hate to be spokesman here but if anyone is interested in video editing Premiere Pro is the way to go! It was pretty intimidating at first, at least to me, (the layout of the program is kind of busy) but all that was required was a little instruction to bridge the language barrier. My only concern is whether or not I can use all of the features to my, ODFW, and especially the public’s advantage!

I don’t think I explicitly said what I will be doing this summer. My goal is to create outreach videos using our ROV (remote-operated vehicle) footage. We have hundreds of clips from many different dives all along the Oregon Coast. Not many people know what’s under the ocean, so my job is to compile our footage and get it out there! Keeping the public informed is a big part of ODFW.

Adobe aside, I’ve been working a little bit with Google Maps. I have created a map of the 2006 – 2007 Yelloweye Rockfish Conservation Area and linked some ROV footage from YouTube to it. Right now it’s not public, but maybe in the future it will be! While it’s a small step, it’s a step in the right direction. Next comes Google Earth! I would like everyone to check out ODFW’s YouTube page: http://www.youtube.com/user/IEODFW. If you go to the ‘Underwater Marine Life’ channel we already have some ROV footage uploaded from 2009 and 2010 – this is also where the videos I create will be added. Please browse some of the other videos while you’re at it – I recommend ‘Crabbing on the Oregon Coast’ (something I hope to do while I am here)! Bob Swingle, our I&E guy for web design and maintenance, is organizing/designing the Underwater Marine Life channel and adding our videos. So stay tuned!

People have been pretty helpful here at ODFW. Despite being busy they’re making time in their schedules to meet, or talk, with me. It’s always an interesting task of immersing yourself into a new job situation but it has been pretty easy here. So thanks ODFW!

My forecast for next week includes completing my Adobe Premiere Pro training, learning the whole Google Earth interface, and hopefully completing several small highlight videos as well!

Living in Oregon…

Newport is great. It’s centrally located on the coast so road trips both North and South are entirely feasible. This past weekend some of us scholars traveled North to Lincoln City for a scenic hike to Drift Creek Falls. Also happening in Lincoln City past weekend was the Kite Festival, so we got to check that out. The weather has been and continues to be great – not as much rain as I expected – however, it can be a tad chilly.

Lincoln City Kite Festival

Saving Oysters in Oregon – week 2

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research by kayak. a break from science. playing with concrete

Sea kayaking. Is hard.

Steve, my advisor, wanted to visit the dredge islands of Coos Bay to collect oyster shells for several different projects, and he suggested kayaking to get them.  I immediately loved the idea.  Recreation and science together!  So we got buckets, trash bags, and ziplock bags to gather up hundreds of forgotten oyster shells and set off for these islands.

The dredge islands were formed the many times Coos Bay was dredged for the safe passage of ships.  Deep canals were created by digging up all the sediment and placing it on one side of the bay, creating heaps of stuff that used to be on the bay floor.  After years and years, grasses, shrubs, and trees colonized the newly formed islands and created what you see on the left.  Much of it is still inundated with water except during low tides as you can see on the right.  What’s most interesting about these dredge islands, is that they are comprised of thousands of old oyster shells that were picked up from the bottom of the bay along with all the sediment during the dredgings.  Apparently, oysters used to be abundant in the subtidal waters of Coos Bay, and you can still see their remnants by the hundreds in some areas, just like in the middle picture.

We collected oyster shells for a number of different projects.  1) Since these oysters were most likely from subtidal waters (always submerged), we wanted to compare their sizes with the intertidal oysters (exposed during low tides) that are common today.  We expect the subtidal oysters to be larger because Olympia oysters seem to fare better if they are submerged for longer periods of time.  A known-sized square was sectioned off, and all the whole and intact shells within that area were collected and will be used for the comparison.  2) We also collected the biggest shells we could find, and about 10 gallons of crushed shells to use in our Oly Roc project, which I will describe later.
I’ve found that field research is a great deal of fun, but a lot of hard work.  I was completely exhausted by the end of this collection trip, which is probably explained by the fact that my kayaking partner and I could not seem to paddle in the direction we wanted for about an hour, and maybe because we got stuck up to our knees in soft mud several times, but that seems to be the life of a field researcher.  You go up against the elements, explore to find new and exciting things.. and learn where you shouldn’t go next time.
I finally took a break from science and got the chance to sit in on a national reserve’s board meeting.  The administration, the scientists, public relations, education outreach, and the head of the Department of State Lands all came together to talk about all the issues that pertain to an estuary reserve.  I did not realize how complicated and complex these could be.  Governmental departments, non-profits, community groups, academia, are all involved, and they all want to help but also need to be appeased.  To be honest, I got pretty lost after only maybe 10 minutes in this meeting.  I also did not realize how much the operations of such a group rely on money.  They need to be funded to employ staff, maintain the grounds, implement projects, and do scientific research.  It seemed like a very stressful topic.  Even though they are granted money by the state’s budget, it is not much, and they have to apply for more funding through grants, and they lose money left and right from budget cuts.  It seemed like they had a lot on their plates, what with the responsibility to meet the demands of many different groups but being restricted by money, manpower, and their own jurisdiction.  I have a lot of respect for them.
Moving on, the last project of the weeks was the Oly Rocs!  Olympia oyster restoration is happening all over the Northwestern coast, but what makes Coos Bay special is that there is constantly a high level of larval recruitment.  That means that the bay gets thousands and thousands of little oyster babies looking for a suitable place to call home.  The problem is, much of the suitable places have been destroyed by man and nature, and the tiny oysters have nowhere stable and safe enough to be able to survive.
So we’re going to try to create some for them!  We need lots and lots of shells because oyster babies love growing on them, and something heavy and durable enough to not just disperse into the open sea because of the major tide action.
Answer: Lots of shell and concrete.
So I made my first Oly Roc – a trial run, I would say.  It needs a lot of work and tweaking in terms of the process of making it.  I am just learning about mixing, placing, and curing concrete, and then I have to think about toxicity for the oysters and the possibility of the concrete weakening in saltwater.  If you know anything about those two, let me know!
What’s in store for next week:  probably working on perfecting the Oly Roc, gathering information for short blurbs to educate the public on native oysters and restoring them, and learning about data loggers that will help us track environmental changes in the bay!

Sea_Gil’s Blog Pt.2

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Hi all! It’s Margaretmary again. During my second week working for the EPA, I had the chance to attend some meetings and that made me feel pretty professional, as I have never before had a job that required meetings. These meetings were very important because they were an opportunity for me to discuss which bivalve shell characteristics were the ones we should try to capture for the database in terms of ocean acidification.  But this meant I had to do my homework so to speak. I had to read over numerous scientific articles and large books in order to familiarize myself with bivalve shell terminology. Some words and phrases I had never even heard of before such as periostracum and complex crossed lamellar layer. Thanks to my reading I definitely feel more confident in my knowledge of shell structure. Aside from reading, I began filling out information in the data sheet that my mentors and I set up. I am doing this for each family of bivalve found in the Pacific Northwest and the information includes things like what type of calcium carbonate shell a family has.

One of the major challenges of this project is gathering all the information needed for the data sheet. As of right now I am mainly using two sources to get most of the data, but there are still many characteristics that are not mentioned in either one that are needed for the database. I will probably have to scour the internet and library for additional sources so that I can fill out as much of the data as possible.

Another challenge I encountered this past week was the epic saga of book scanning. One of my coworkers got a book from the library for me to use and when my mentor saw it he decided it would be helpful to have an electronic copy of it. The electronic copy would make things much easier on me because I can just search the document for keywords. Now I had never scanned a book before so I was taught how to by a person on the EPA staff. It seemed pretty easy and I was under the impression that I would scan the pages as jpegs and then be able to convert those images into a pdf file. I was very wrong and found this out a little late. After scanning about seventy pages I was told that I had to save the scans as pdfs and that I would have to go back and rescan all the pages I had already done. So finishing that scanning process will be one of the things I will be doing this week. I imagine I will also be filling out more of the data sheet as well.

But enough of that scanning debacle. I really enjoyed my weekend. My Sea Grant friends and I went to Drift Creek Falls on Saturday. After hiking for about a mile and a half, we crossed a (kind of scary) suspension bridge and climbed some rocks to get very close to a waterfall! This was the first waterfall I have ever seen and it was totally awesome. To finish out the weekend, my roommate and I went clamming (I purchased by clamming license, so I’m trying to get some good use out of it). We dug up around 10 clams in total and she suggested we try to make a chowder. I have to give mad props to Betty for her great Novice Clammer Louisiana Clam Chowder™. Yum yum!

Drift Creek Waterfall!

The Orange Vest…Guided

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i like how this blog greets me with “howdy diego”.

This week’s highlights in 7 bullets: Note that the other two interns, Adaline and Dylan, are here now and this week, we got trained.

1) Monday: Dr. “Mudflat” gave us a tour of the…well… mudflats on the Yaquina Bay. The challenge was to soak it all up in the hour that we were there. Then we got a tour of HMSC, went through our OceanQuest presentation (a powerpoint presentation based on underwater vents and volcanoes that scientists at Hatfield studied), and talked about hypoxia with the experts (pisco).

2) Tuesday: Money counting intro, Dr. R gave us an estuary lecture, then Mr. J gave us an estuary tour, OceanQuest again, this time with public, then fisheries training and dock walk with KH (this was awesome).

Dock Walk: notice the bridge in the back

Rogue on Tuesday… almost forgot/remembered

3) Wednesday: Opening procedures (repeat for me), Yaquina Head (fell from the rock and scraped my hand…infected), amazing tidepooling (i didn’t have my camera)! Estuary Walk and OCEANQUEST again!!!!

4) Thursday: Learned how to take care of the fish, water quality, feed them, etc, Estuary walk, OceanQuest. Scheduling days off/on for the summer with the other interns. It was challenging to bargain with the other interns to get the weekends off, but it worked out at the end.

Ursula the Octopus

5) Friday: Estuary Walk, OceanQuest, Manual labor with Tim… I like Tim.

This week was basically a lot of repetition of our tours that we would be doing all summer long and an outline of the basic expectations for our final projects/exhibits. It was challenging but fun to practice our estuary walks and our oceanquest presentation.

6) Saturday: FIRST DAY OF WORK. Mentor is out of town, just me and Adaline. We open, hang, and I give an estuary tour to 12 scouts, who gave me positive feedback on the visitor center logbook!!!!! I was so excited to know that I did a good job on my first time around, which I owe to Ralph and Old Man Jerry, and Dr. Mudflat, my estuary mentors. Then I worked on my timeline for my final project, did OceanQuest for a few sleepieheads (lesson learned: don’t turn the lights all the way down in the auditorium)… and went play with our koi fish in the west wing… I like them because they kiss me in the knuckles.

7) Sunday: woke up to make some rice to hopefully have it ready by lunch. oh no! barely donnne but no cigar. Betty finished it for me… thank you Betty. Then i opened, Adaline gave the estuary tour and I worked in the Visitor Center on my timeline. Then I ran home, got my lentils and rice, and ate it while i walked back to work (give me more time to eaaaaaaaaaaat!) I wish i could have played beach volleyball…oh well. I met people from Memphis and we talked about fisheries and the blues, then I came home to cook some clam chowder, sea_gil and betty got some clams while i was out, so we went to fred meyer to get some ingredients and some other food stuffs… Betty cooked it after I opened those suckers up

By Betty

arrgh

now i write this blog entry while my pictures upload so i can post them within it. Posted

NEXT WEEK:

According to my timeline, next week I will brainstorm on ideas for my exhibit, as well as give more estuary tours and OceanQuest presentations…

I hope i can have more enthusiasm for the OceanQuest presentations since its right after lunch time and i have the “itis”.

god bless ghostshrimps, octopuses, mole crabs,and my orange vest…

 

 

 

 

Herring Eggs and Other Oddities.

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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!

2 weeks down, already?

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I know this is a bit cliche to say, but my goodness, time is moving by fast! I have already completed the 2nd week of my 10 week internship and I feel like I just started.

This week has been filled with lots of emails, phone calls, stacks of policy documents, and meetings. I realized mid-week that I am in love with the field I am working towards right now. Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning (CMSP) is cutting-edge for both the science and policy realms. It is also a field that calls for interdisciplinary work and requires individuals to be literate in both fields. Marine science and policy are my two passions that I have not been able to decide between; CMSP unites both. I am already starting to develop graduate school ideas for how I could contribute to this field with my future PhD.

The most interesting part of this week was sitting in on a webcast for a national policy meeting for CMSP. On Tuesday I got up at the crack ‘o’ dawn to sit in on the meeting at 6 am. To provide some very brief background, in July of last year, Obama created 9 new ocean policy priorities for the United States. Developing CMSP for coastal regions and the territorial seas of the United States was one of them. CMSP is a process where map layers of the ocean (topography, biology, oceanography) are combined with the human needs for marine resources. Spatial and decision-making computer programs map these together to identify areas of high priority (EX: finding areas of high conflicting interests, or seeking areas that are biologically most vulnerable). The national meeting that I watched online was designed to receive input from stakeholders (people who have a vested interest in the ocean) on the CMSP process laid out by the National Ocean Council. It was also a venue to help inform stakeholders about the CMSP process and the vision behind making it a national priority. While listening to agency heads was a bit boring in the beginning, I found the workshop to be very informative and engaging to listen in on.

If you are curious for more detail into what CMSP is about, I will be writing a more lengthy blog description on my personal blog AnnaRose and the Sea later today. Also if you are interested in some links to national policy visit the White House’s National Ocean Council website for more information.

 

Saving Oysters in Oregon – week 1

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Hello there!

A quick introduction:  My name is Joanne Choi and I am recent graduate from Yale University where I studied Environmental Studies with an emphasis on marine systems.  My main research interest was in jellyfish ecology, specifically relationships with endosymbiotic bacteria and polyp settlement.  I have also done research in the Turks & Caicos Islands with the School for Field Studies on the effectiveness of marine protected areas, and in St. Thomas, USVI on rates of soil run-off and sedimentation in the Caribbean.  I am here in the Oregon Sea Grant program to gain more experience before I apply to graduate school for a career in marine environmental work at the intersection of science, policy, and outreach!  Outside of academics, I am a socal native, a dancer, an amateur-but-almost-there! scuba diver, a travel addict, a recreational photographer, and.. a dork.. as evidenced by the fact that it took me at least 30 minutes to find a nice, serious picture of me appropriate for this website.

 

Now, on to more important things… What exactly am I doing during my internship with Oregon Sea Grant?

OYSTER RESTORATION!!

I am working to restore the Native Olympia Oysters, Ostrea lurida, to Coos Bay and the South Slough in Oregon.  They used to flourish in the estuaries and coastal waters off the west coast hundreds of years ago before the Native Americans harvested them, tsunamis and earthquakes buried them under sediment, Europeans brought over non-native Pacific oysters for large-scale production, and the usual habitat modification, sedimentation, overfishing, and so on from human use of coastal lands.

Oysters provide many indispensable ecosystem services, however, including:

  • improving water quality through filtration
  • ocean bottom stabilization
  • providing a complex habitat for biodiverse ecosystems

and thus, it would be extremely advantageous for us to help these at-risk species recover to sustainable levels.

My Advisor…

is Steve Rumrill, a scientist at South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve, an assistant professor at University of Oregon, graduate faculty at Oregon State University, and on the board for (it seems like) countless councils and advisory committees.  Even if I have only known him for a few days, I can say that he is an amazing mentor who is extremely willing to share his knowledge and expertise, offer opportunities for me to get as much hands-on training and experience as I can, and give advice on how to maneuver in the marine world career-wise.

What I’ve done so far..

  1. I read tons and TONS of academic papers, packets on workshop proceedings, a powerpoint, etc on oyster ecology, oyster restoration efforts around the world, and the natural history of Olympia oysters in Coos Bay.  I didn’t know much about oysters to begin with, so I had to be caught up.
  2. Made friends with the summer session and graduate students here at OIMB.  At first, I was worried that I was the only OSG scholar in Charleston, OR, which is at least 2 hours away from the rest of the group.  But the people here are extremely friendly and fun, and there are tons of cool things to do here.  I’ve already gone to a beach bonfire, tidepooling, trekked through a tunnel to find an isolated beach, and into Coos Bay a few times (had to go to Goodwill because, Daang! it’s COLDER than I thought it would be!)
  3. Collected oyster shell bags and scrubbed them.  Bags of Pacific oyster shells (because there are a lot of them) are deployed in various locations in Coos Bay as recruitment sites for Olympia oyster larvae.  After a year or two, they are taken out of the water and cleaned to remove possible competitors, predators, sand and mud that may decrease flow-through, so that the juvenile Oysters have a better chance at survival.  They are also scrubbed so that invasive species are not spread when we re-locate bags.
  4. Had meetings with other graduate students, postdocs, professors, and policy makers who are all involved in the oyster restoration process.

What I will do next..

  1. Make Oly ROCS (Olympia – Restore Oysters with Cement Substrata).  We are going to construct, test, deploy, and evaluate a new technique to embed living Oly (Olympia) oysters into substrate that will hopefully attract more oysters to attach and settle for a more long-term arrangement than the oyster shell bags.
  2. There are many more possible projects including installing & operating a water quality datalogger, and some personal projects of mine such as attempting to mountain bike to get to some cool sites around here, but I will explain more about those as they come up!

 

APOLOGIES for making this SOO long!  I wasn’t expecting to be such a talkative blogger, but SO much has happened in the past week!  I’ll try to take more pictures so you can see all my cool projects in-action, but as you’ll soon see, it can become quite a dirty job working in the field with mud.. not to mention a little dangerous for a digital camera when you’re working with water.

Until next time!!

‘Ore-eh-gun’ |wk.1|

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Hello, hello, hello!

It has been one week since I first arrived in Corvallis, Oregon to begin my internship. A lot has happened! I’ve met lots of great people and seen lots of cool places – but first, a short intro. I hail from Michigan which is also where I go to school (Michigan Technological University). I have one year to go and then I’ll have my BS in Biology with a concentration in fish bio, and a minor in ecology. I’ll be working with Mike Donnellan at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) under the Marine Resources Program (MRP).

I decided to drive to Oregon which was about 39 hours away, taking three days and two nights, and crossing 10 states. While it was a bit intense, it was a great experience, and I got lots of great pics. Plus, how often can you say you drove across the country? :)

Since my arrival, and mainly last weekend, I’ve managed to see the banana slugs in the Redwood National Forest in California, numerous hundred+ foot waterfalls along the Colombian River Gorge, and the 11,249 foot Mt. Hood. I hope to see more while I’m here learning and working!

Coast Redwoods

While I wasn’t exploring I was working. Part of what I have been doing this past week has been familiarizing myself with ODFW and the whole West coast in general. There are a lot of species I’m not familiar with and it has been real interesting to learn about them – I even had the opportunity to visit the Oregon Coast Aquarium, which I highly recommend.

The other part consisted of me building a framework for how I will be tackling my project. There are a lot of things I need to learn, like Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 or building a map interface on GoogleMaps/Earth. What we want to try to do is pinpoint locations on a map where the general public can go, click on the point, and see underwater ROV footage of that exact spot. Surprisingly, not many people really know what the ocean floor looks like! I am getting a lot of ideas from people so I’m excited to see where this project will take me and how much I can accomplish!

 

 

 

Week 1: Getting an Outline

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Hello everyone! Thought I would get everyone up to date on what has been going on here on my end of the line! I spent most of last week getting oriented and outlining how I am going to approach my project. My job is to create a website promoting the marine sciences here at Oregon State University. I created an outline for how the website would be organized and then met with Jenna Borberg to determine whether or not I was on the right track. I struggled a little bit to figure out what the focus should be for this site, but after meeting with Jenna I came to the conclusion that I am going to make research features a top priority. I spent the rest of the week reading the content of the latest Terra magazine for ideas about what to include in the site. I have created a ROUGH outline of what categories the site might include. I used DrupalGardens to do this, but I am planning to attend a Drupal training session in a week or two because I still have a lot to learn about web design and management. To see the categories I hope to include in the site you can visit:

http://marinescience.drupalgardens.com/

This week I hope to read up on current projects going on in all of the departments and institutes represented in the Marine Council. I will then compile a list of potential researchers to feature. I hope to meet with Pat Kight later in the week to get her feedback before I pursue emailing people about interviews. I anticipate spending a good chunk of time working on writing new features, finding existing features to pull from, and creating short 30 second readable news feed items. Outreach, education, and an events calendar will be the second tier of items I will focus on.

Hope everybody has a fun and productive week!

~Shealyn Friedrich