NOAA Coastal Management Fellowship Matching Workshop

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Hello!

As a recent graduate of Oregon State University’s Marine Resource Management Program and a current NOAA Coastal Management Fellow, I have been asked to provide a description of the NOAA Coastal Management Fellowship program and the matching workshop that was held this past May.

The NOAA Coastal Management Fellowship is administered by the NOAA Coastal Services Center and is a 2 year fellowship where recent postgraduates are placed in state agencies to assist them in a variety of coastal management issues. Each year, state agencies that are responsible for administering their coastal zone programs submit proposals for a fellow. Six of these state agencies are chosen, and then a request is put out for recent postgraduates (or upcoming postgraduates) to apply. Each state’s Sea Grant is responsible for the initial interviews, and then may choose candidates to endorse to the NOAA Coastal Services Center. The Center then narrows the pool down to 12 postgraduate candidates to participate in a matching workshop with the 6 states that won the proposal bid. Whew! But it is not done yet! An intensive week long workshop ensues and 6 of the candidates are matched up with the 6 state projects. I’m here to describe my experience of this fun “American Idol” style workshop.

In May of 2012, NOAA Coastal Services Center flew me out to Charleston, S.C. where I and 10 other fellow candidates stayed in a historic inn in downtown Charleston. The first day was pretty low key for the candidates. Introductions were made and we were able to meet the 6 state mentors, our fellow candidates, some employees of the NOAA Coastal Services Center, and Tridec Technologies employees (the company that NOAA contracts with to pay the fellows). That first afternoon was packed full of state mentors presenting each of their proposed projects. The states were: Maryland, Delaware, Massachusetts, California, Washington, and the Commonwealth of the North Mariana Islands. This was an excellent opportunity to hear more about the projects and for candidates to better gauge their interest levels. It was also interesting to see that a couple of the state mentors were former NOAA Coastal Fellows!

Early the next morning, it was time for each of the candidates to present themselves. All presentations were fun to watch, everyone had a different style, but most presented on their graduate work, extra experiences, and bit of personal flare! That afternoon the candidates participated in a mentor-mentee workshop that was hosted by the center.

Wednesday was an all day marathon of interviews. Each interview was an hour, and you could sign up for as many or as few interviews as you wanted. I chose to interview with all six states, since I didn’t want to limit my options, plus it is a great networking opportunity! All of the week’s activities were hosted in the hotel, so it was very easy to stop by my room for a quick break in between interviews. Some of the interviews were held outside in a courtyard, while others were in the hotel rooms of the mentors. I had a great vibe throughout the process. Each mentor was relaxed and easy to talk to. They made a stressful situation as fun as it could be!

Thursday morning was follow-up interviews to give everyone a chance to address additional questions if needed. In the afternoon, candidates and mentors alike went to the beach for some sun and some fun! It was a great way to relax with fellow candidates and mentors. That evening all of us went out for dinner. Throughout the week candidates often got together for dinners and lunches. Charleston has excellent cuisine! Thursday evening we handed in our rankings. We could rank our top three state choices, and the mentors did the same. Then the Center matches everyone up according to the ranks.

Friday morning we were called down individually for the results. I got my #1 pick and am currently working for the Washington State Department of Ecology! I’m also happy to report that many of the candidates that were not matched at the workshop were able to find jobs that were excellent fits for them by the end of the summer! It was a bright and fun group of people, and I feel lucky to be a part of that group.

The overall experience of the workshop was very positive. Although it was stressful and nerve wracking at times, I felt that the NOAA Coastal Services Center put together a great environment that was inviting and relaxing. The attitudes of the mentors and my fellow candidates were always positive and greatly contributed to the success of the workshop. We joke that it is an “American Idol” type week, because we are all staying in the same hotel, we eat together, make friends, yet in the end we are competing against each other for a prestigious national fellowship. However, the group dynamic was fantastic and it was simply a joy to be around others who have the same passions for marine science, coastal issues, and sustainable management as I do.

For those of you interested in the upcoming NOAA Coastal Fellowship year, here are some links:

http://www.csc.noaa.gov/cms/fellows.html

http://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/fellowships/noaa-coastal-management

I’ve been working at the WA Department of Ecology for 3 months now. All is going well and I will be posting again in the upcoming months to describe a bit more of my project here in Washington!

Greetings!

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Greetings oceanophiles! As this is my first blog post as a Sea Grant scholar, I feel I should give a little background about myself. I am just beginning my second year as a Ph.D. student with Drs. Tawnya Peterson and Joseph Needoba at Oregon Health & Science University in Beaverton, OR. My degree track is Environmental Science and Engineering, with a focus on Estuary and Ocean Systems. I have always loved the Pacific Northwest, and am constantly amazed that I get to study it for a living.

So what am I actually doing? The goal of my research is to identify links between pH and pCO2 concentration in the water and population dynamics of harmful algal blooms (HABs) in the northern California Current system. My research specifically focuses on the marine dinoflagellate Alexandrium. This little guy is the alga that is primarily responsible for paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) events off the west coast of North America. Alexandrium produces saxitoxin, an extremely potent neurotoxin. Shellfish are filter feeders, and accumulate toxins when they feed on HAB species in the surrounding water. When there is an increased number of Alexandrium in the water (as frequently happens in the summer months), saxitoxin builds up to dangerous levels in the shellfish and can cause paralysis in humans and animals. What I want to do is discover whether there is a link between the pH/pCO2 content of the water and population dynamics and toxin production of Alexandrium.

I expect to be spending a lot of time on boats in the next few years, stalking the wild Alexandrium through the Columbia River estuary and out on the coast, but I will probably spend far more time in the lab. To that end, I am in the process of building a chemostat culture system, which will grow algae at a constant rate in a nutritionally static environment. Influx and efflux of media to and from the culture vessel are synchronized to the growth rate of the algae to maintain a constant growth rate.

 

The constant influx of fresh media and efflux of waste will ensure that the nutrient load of the culture vessel remains constant. I also designed the system to automatically monitor and control pH using a custom made pneumatic manifold that will change the pH of the culture vessel by bubbling it with CO2 gas. The monitoring will be accomplished by a Labview program that will also allow for remote monitoring of the system, and send will me alarms if/when something goes wrong. I have already finished the first iteration of the chemostat system and am in the process of working out the bugs (waste overflows, variable pump rates, etc.).

I’m excited to see where this year will take me and to see what new adventures lie in wait, both in the lab and out on the water. Tallyho!

 

 

Summers End

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The rainless, hot days that have accompanied the last four weeks seemed to have lulled me into a false sense of perpetual summer. As I finished up last week I realized as my time at Sea Grant is coming to a close, the summer is likewise drawing nearer to the end. So, I took some time off from working on my project and presentation and decided to take my first trip back home to Portland this summer.  While I grew up there, Portland never seems to stop changing in interesting and delicious ways. I spent most of my weekend eating my way through various neighborhoods and districts, some of the highlights included a gourmet  grilled peanut butter and jelly sandwich stand (the only way I know you can order bacon, cherry jam, jalapenos and peanut butter on the same sandwich), and bleu cheese and pear ice cream from Salt & Straw (seriously, amazing). It was also wonderful to get some much needed back-to-school shopping done, and of course spend some time with my friends and family.

Returning back to the office I am refreshed and rejuvenated, ready to tackle the next week of preparations for our symposium at the end of the week. Preparing my presentation so far has been particularly challenging, I feel like I have never had a presentation that requires as much balancing and specific language as this one does. I feel this is a product partially of the nature and purpose of the workshop, simply because a major topic of the workshop was to identify the most effective ways to communicate these issues to a range of professionals and members of the public, and since part of my presentation requires ‘setting the stage’ for the workshop, I feel it is important to carefully consider the way I am communicating and presenting these issues. This really puts the workshop in perspective with my long term goals of improving interdisciplinary communication, and provides me with valuable opportunity to practice my communication skills.

Week 9: Summer…finished?

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After finishing up the loose ends on my project last week, while also working on my presentation for the symposium this Friday, it has hit me that the summer and this experience is coming to an end. Having graduated and planning on taking a year or two off before I pursue grad school, makes the conclusion of this experience all the more startling. Speaking of which, I am available for hire to any interested parties. Please submit your contact information, and I will gladly respond promptly with my resume and cover letter :)

But back to reflecting on my time as a Sea Grant Scholar. This was an experience that I enjoyed thoroughly. It has been a goal of mine for quite sometime to get an internship at an agency like the EPA, and I have enjoyed every minute of it. Even the countless minutes spent in a dark room extracting and analyzing chlorophyll. I’d like to thank Sea Grant and my mentors for making this happen for me. You guys are the best; it has been a pleasure working with people who are so knowledgeable and enthusiastic about marine science.

Final Cut Pro snap tool

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So far so good working on the videos. The graduate video has turned into two, one illustrating the marine resource management program at CEOAS and one illustrating a zoology program that lets students travel to the Bahamas to study lionfish. Both clips are just about finished, given some touch-ups and photo release forms from extra subjects who are in the photos. (Fingers crossed the releases come through.) The third video about the OSG Summers Scholars program is also almost complete, but only after some wrangling with the Final Cut Pro X program.

One difference between Final Cut 7 and Pro (which is the most recent version) is a feature called the “snap tool.” In Final Cut 7, this was a feature that could be turned on or off depending on the producers preference. In Final Cut X, the snap tool automatically pulls all of the clips you have cut forward on the timeline, making a somewhat seamless clip to work with. The problem lies in the fact that in Final Cut X, you can’t turn it off. This sounds like a helpful feature, but in reality, I’ve come to understand that this is one of the new features the masses have been unhappy with. Automatic snap makes it nearly impossible to efficiently sort your project according to subject, time, etc., because everything moves on its own, taking all the sound clips and text overlays with it, and things can get out of control pretty quickly. After poking through some Final Cut forums I found that the best way to work around the automatic snap is to lay a blank clip in the timeline that snaps and begin to build your project around it. While this still isn’t ideal for organization, it works much better for keeping your media clips where you would like them and lets you save sections for later placement. Despite the frustration that came while trying to navigate the automatic snap tool, it’s been a good learning experience that I can take with me. I’ve wanted to purchase video editing software for my home computer so I can work on projects as needed, but have been hesitant because I’ve heard negative things about Final Cut X. Now I know a bit about it and would feel comfortable working with it on my own.

The first time I saw a whale

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The first time I saw a whale on the Oregon Coast was last summer while taking the marine mammals class offered at HMSC.  It’s only a month long class but we had field trips every week and many of those trips were just to look for whales migrating along the coastline.  Gray whales are particularly awesome because when making their summer migration they are nearly always visible from land.  We had been seeing whales for a couple of weeks pretty far offshore but the whale sighting I remember most was about halfway through the class.  We were up at Boiler Bay standing above the cliffs just to the south of the parking lot.  It was pretty foggy when we got there and we weren’t really expecting to see anything because of the weather. Out of nowhere a whale surfaced just off the cliffs below us closer than any whale e had seen before.  We immediately jumped the fence to get to the lower section of cliffs hoping to get a super close up of the whale.  The next time the whale surfaced it was literally 10 feet off the cliffs and about 20-30 feet below us.  I could see into its eye.  I had to consciously make an effort not to piss my pants.

In a related event almost exactly a year after my unforgettable experience…

The little boy at the visitor center last week didn’t hold back his excitement when he saw his first whale.  He and his family walked in about 5 minutes before closing even after our words of discouragement.  Generally we will tell people that walk in near closing that there isn’t enough time to see anything so its best to come back in the morning.  The little boy and his family didn’t seem too interested in letting 5 minutes of their lives go to waste.  This kiddo walked straight to the display case of miniature carved whales, stared at them, and presumably in an expression of utter disbelief, excitement, and enlightenment peed himself.  I can hardly blame him. I felt the same way when I first saw a whale up close.  I am sure this experience will be forever engrained in his memory (or at least the memory of his extremely embarrassed parents). I would venture to say after my experience and the experience of this child that every person nearly pees him or herself when seeing a whale for the first time.

 

Week 9 blog: A Short Week

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This work week was a short one for me. On Tuesday, I worked on some new ideas for the tsunami exhibit. We are considering abandoning the Lego idea altogether and using per-fabricated wooden structures (similar to an idea used by OSU’s wave lab). For most of that day I was doing research on what the wave center had done and coming up with prototype models for use in our wave tank. It is still a work in progress and will make an interesting last minute twist to my project presentation this Friday.  Wednesday was a relatively normal day at the visitor center  with the exception of a few hundred  students that arrived for a morning tour. The yellow submarine that we painted last week still looks shiny and new; a nice greeting for our visitors.

I was lucky enough to use some accumulated days off and have a five day weekend. It was nice to go home for a day and then on to our annual family weekend camp out.  I also spent a lot of time working on my presentation for Friday. While I was away it hit me that the summer is almost over and I realized how much I enjoyed it and would miss my co-workers. Becca and Mackenzie have been great supervisors and I have learned so much from them and from my mentor Bill Hanshumaker.   My fellow interns are good people and while we are all very different, I have come to admire each of them.  Brian for his nearly encyclopedic knowledge of tide pool organisms, his ability to keep a cool head even in crazy circumstances (such as when all of the water pipes in the visitor center randomly break) and his handy skills, whether it is building a mock up of a wave energy device or creating very elaborate looking homemade fishing gear.  Diana for her ability to pick up things so quickly. In the short time she has been here she has quickly become an expert on all things Oregon and she brought with her an exceptional knowledge of the octopus to share.  Julie for her ability to cheer up people all around her. She has been working hard on her climate change/ free choice learning project while still having the time to work in the visitor center whenever we are short. I consider myself extremely lucky to have had the opportunity to work with all these fine people this summer.

Fishing Trip and Angry Fishermen

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This week I had the amazing opportunity to go down to Redfish Rocks Marine Reserve in Port Orford to go fishing with the ODFW Marine Reserves Biological monitoring team! Redfish Rocks was one of two Marine Reserves in Oregon to close down to fishing in January 2012, so this may sound a bit ironic. However, our fishing was catch-and-release and was purely for scientific purposes.

Fishing in Port Orford is quite the experience, because there is no marina, so all the boats must be hoisted from the water with a giant crane and then left sitting dry on the dock. In order to begin our trip we were lowered 30 feet down to the ocean. We spent most of the morning attempting to fish while the team serviced the CTDs. I will forever remember what a CTD is from answering the acronym wrong on an Oceanography test, but basically it is a device that measures salinity, temperature, depth, and this particular one was also equipped with fluorometer to measure chlorophyll content. There are two CTDs in this area, one inside the reserve and outside the reserve. These CTDs are unique in the fact that they are bolted to the bottom of the ocean (usually they are dragged behind a boat). In order to bring up the CTDs to extract the data, we had to have a diver go down and unbolt them from the bottom of the ocean. Unfortunately I wasn’t really able to help much with this part of the trip, because I was overly optimistic and didn’t take enough dramamine which unfortunately resulted in a bad case of seasickness and lost breakfast :(

Luckily I was able to rally in time for fishing. The purpose of our fishing trip was to gather some data about the biomass of fish in the reserve and outside of the reserve so to add to the collection that they have already started. This data can then be compared with fish biomass numbers five or ten years down the road to see what kind of an effect the reserve is having on the fish. Each fisher also wore a stopwatch to track total fishing time in so that catch per unit of effort can be calculated as well. We were definitely in a prime fishing location, because on several occaisions I would barely have my line in the water for a minute before I would reel in another fish. My favorite part was watching all the different types of species that came up; Black Rockfish, Blue Rockfish, Yellowtail Rockfish, Canary Rockfish, and Ling Cod. I was pretty proud of the fact that I caught 11 fish including a gorgeous 51cm Canary Rockfish. However, My catch piddled in comparison to the captain who kept bringing in 12 pound Ling Cod.  Although I enjoy my social science, it was pretty awesome be out in the field with biological scientists and I consider myself very lucky for having the opportunity!

I had a reality check when I returned to my job as normal in Lincoln City. I finally had the inevitable rough interview with a fisherman in the Salmon River area. Although I had been warned that these fishermen are adamantly against marine reserves, I truly believed it when in the middle of an interview one of them told me that I could take my marine reserve and shove it. It didn’t take long for my frustration with this interview to turn into amusement and I built my nerve back up to talk to another one. The next one was upset as well, and he described marine reserves as a type of conspiracy theory, I quote, “See this is what happens when people go to school and read too many books.” I had to laugh at this one. Props to the fishermen for of the Salmon River for  helping me to develop a thicker skin this summer.

Smiles on the job :)

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There have always been smiles in my life because I turned out to be a smiley person with all my crazy mannerisms and  sounds that mean words.  These sounds and mannerisms come out even more when I’m really happy, thus anyone who came into the Hatfield Marine Science Center and saw me would know that I LOVE my job.  This past week has been filled with smiles, not only from me, but from many visitor’s both tall and small.  On Monday, everyone who worked with me was asking me how my vacation was and was so happy that I got a break from the craziness of work.  Also, that day Aurora was fed quite happily and I had many people who said they loved the marine science center and couldn’t wait to come back again next summer.  Then, Tuesday was a great project day because I got to see my wave tank in action even more.  A summer camp with 56 kids and a boy scout troop of 23 came in at the same time and tested out my erosion wave tank.  Also, I got to be at the tide pool touch tanks for most of the morning and have some amazing questions asked by children about the animals and their environment.  On a cool/sad note I got to see a fish necropsy to see why it passed away which was highly informative while the death was a sad state of affairs.

On Wednesday which was my only day off this week, I got to do something quite different.  I went with Hillary to Cascade head and see what she does for her internship.  I got to take pictures of her interviewing many people about their view on marine reserves and taking pressure counts of people at each site.  I saw her interview many types of people from local fisherman to families just traveling to the coast for a few days.  These surveys asked very interesting questions and I got to hear various answers such as people who think marine reserves are great and others who had very strong opinions about how unsuccessful they would be.  Hillary did and is still doing an amazing job for her internship and it was a treat to see her in action was well as get to go to Cascade Head as well as the Lincoln city outlets.  Even at the outlets I got some great deals on jeans and workout clothes :)

The rest of the week was just as amazing as the start and challenges actually didn’t occur this week.  Many people may consider that boring, just like how a story without conflict is boring, but smiles are never boring to me.  I got to do more estuary tours, even one with 32 people on it! So many people, but I still got asked some highly intelligent questions.  Then, I showed a girl scout troop from Redmond, OR through the VC.  There were 10 7-8th graders and their leaders.  They were fascinated that I was a lifetime girl scout as well as a broze, silver and gold award winner.  They asked me so many questions and all were different from girl scout ideas to my time as a girly girl scout to marine science.  The VC was really cool to them and that made me smile even more.  Yet, the most exciting thing that made me smile was………….learning to be a feeder! I got to feed every animal in the VC except the octopus such as sea anemones, rock fish, wolf eel and much more.  I traveled around the whole VC with my cart accompanied by Harrison, Kristen (aquarists) and Julie! Together, we fed all the animals a wide variety of food items.  It was one of the best learning experiences I have had at Hatfield and I can’t believe I was so lucky.

Next week I’m sure will also be filled with smiles but also with a little bit of sadness since this will be my last blog post of the summer .  There will also be sadness because my new made friends will all be leaving while Brian, Nick and I stay for another 10 days until the VC changes over to winter hours.  This summer has been filled with crazy, exciting and magical moments that I will keep forever in my memory.  Thanks for everything and I hope for all the best not only in the future of my project, but also all of our OSG Scholar’s futures.