Conservation of Marine Resources

This semester in Conservation of Marine Resources we got to present our data and hard work from the past two semesters. I worked on the goby modeling project. Last semester I spent a lot of time working on the data that we would enter into the model for both land-use and stream elevation. This required many hours of mapping streams in Hawaii wishing that I were there for real and not just through Google Earth! Once that data was imputed we were able to do preliminary runs changing the immigration rate from other islands. At the beginning of this semester we did a second run of the model looking at the potential impact of climate change, specifically increased drought and increased rainfall variability, on the Hawaiian goby population in terms of abundance, population structure, and phenotypic distribution. Overall we found that the populations would be fairly resilient to moderate changes in climate. We made a poster to show our data and were able to present it at three different events throughout the semester. The first was at CBASS which is a weekend planned for prospective graduate students to come visit campus. That was my first time presenting a research poster and I was glad that it was a fairly laid back and friendly environment. The second weekend of spring break the lab traveled to the Benthic Ecology Meeting, which was held in Jacksonville, FL this year. There were lots of people there and we got fancy name tags that made me feel very official.  During the poster presentation I got to meet a lot different people, a couple of which I will be working with this summer in the Florida Keys.  There were many talks on all different topics, as well as a video competition. The final event where I got to present our research was the Focus on Creative Inquiry Event. My favorite part of this was that there were so many different projects from every department on campus. Because all my classes are usually in the Biology department I don’t get to hear much about the research from other fields.  This summer I will be down in the Florida Keys working on my own project about juvenile lobster movement and I am looking forward to getting some field experience and hopefully continuing that project next year.