All right, so this summer, I spent about 20 hours a week in a canoe, rowing to different GPS points to try to take data at different locations in order to learn about the aquatic vegetation. 

So, I worked with Eleanor Robinson, who was my mentor supervisor for the Roger Tory Peterson Estuary Center. You'll get into what that is later. She was the director of the Roger Tory Peterson Estuary Center, and one of the board members of the Connecticut Audubon Society. 

I also worked with Jim Arrigoni, who is a SUNY ESF aquatic ecology PhD candidate. He will be doing his dissertation sometime in November, and he was also my mentor supervisor and he helped us a lot with the logistical details of the scientific study, how to conduct the research, and how to do the analysis of the data. 

We also worked with Allison McCall. She is an MHC alum from the class of '76. And she provided us housing, and is on the board of directors for the Roger Tory Peterson Estuary Center, and is the one that formed the connection between Mount Holyoke, and the Roger Tory Peterson Estuary Center. I also worked with Leila Kouakou who is a fellow MHC student here. 

So the Roger Tory Peterson Estuary center is a branch of the Connecticut Audubon Society. It is meant to be a local center, in order to bring education to the people living in Lyme, Connecticut and the surrounding area. It is a newly formed center. I believe it turned a year old sometime in September, so everything was very new. And we were kind of the pioneers of doing this study, and we were also just kind of helping with the logistical details, and helping the Center reach out. 

Our research objectives with this study were to look at the diversity, abundance, and distribution of the submerged aquatic vegetation in the Connecticut River estuary watershed. A similar study had been done in 1997. That study said that we wanted-- the people who did that study wanted to continue studying that watershed in order to see how the vegetation changed over time. We weren't able to do the entire estuary, but we did two small coves, Whalebone Cove, and Selden Cove. 

Along with doing the study and going out and doing research, and collecting the data and analyzing it, we also did a lot in the means of education. We went to a high school program for in danger students, meaning that those students were in danger of dropping out of school, so our objective was to go and tell them about the study we were doing, and perhaps get them interested in something that they could do locally. So that they weren't just confined to what the school could give them, but they could get interested in education in a new way. 

We also went to Camp Claire, which was a local summer camp. It focused a lot on environmental science, and getting involved in your community, and trying to learn about the environment that you live in. And so, we ran some programs about getting to know vegetation and how that interacts with an aquatic ecosystem. 

So, this study was very important, because submerged aquatic vegetation tends to form the foundation of an ecosystem, because it not only provides habitat, but a lot of times it is the beginning of the food chain. And so this is what ducks, snails, herons, like the one shown, turtles-- We did find this gigantic turtle, snapping turtle, he was probably about this big. It was really cool, but-- Yeah, so that was really important to this gigantic turtle that has probably been living here for a hundred years, and it's important to all the life that will continue to live there. 

Here's some of the main species that we found. Luckily, most of the species that we saw weren't invasive, although there was a pretty big problem with invasive species in Selden Cove that we can get into a little bit later, but these are just some examples of what we were looking at, and what we were finding. 

So I have some pictures of me doing fieldwork. That's probably what I spent more than half of my time doing. In order to actually look at the plants and identify them, we needed to use a potato rake to pull up that vegetation, and go through it, and see what species we found. We also needed an anchor, because our points were only about 30 meters apart. And so we need to stay exactly where we were as we took this data. 

We also mapped all of these points on Google Earth with GIS technology, using a learning GPS to go to those points later on. In Whalebone Cove, we had about 350 points, but in Selden Cove, we had well over a thousand. We collected data at all of these points. We found some pretty significant differences at least in Selden Cove. They were a little bit more similar in Whalebone Cove, but there was still a significance in difference. 

So, this is the difference in Whalebone Cove and while the study was published in 1997, the actual data was taken in 1994, which is why it's in 1994. And so Whalebone Cove was pretty similar, however, the difference in [INAUDIBLE] is Vallisneria and sedum is coontail. And so, we noticed a pretty dramatic difference in Vallisneria and that it was kind of being replaced by other plant species in the cove, and we aren't sure if that will lead to some kind of restoration in the future. In Selden Cove, the one labelled MSPI is invasive, and so that was pretty alarming to us to see-- It was pretty alarming to us to see, at least, what it was like in 1994 compared to now 

And so, this is hard to explain, but there was more of the invasive species there now, but more species are coming in, and that was very concerning for us to see, because Selden Cove had a lot more boats coming in from the river, and so it was bringing new species in, and so while-- It's changing the whole composition of what's there, and so we're thinking that there probably needs to be some sort of restoration because it's changing so drastically. 

That is the end of my presentation. 

[APPLAUSE]