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]