Week Two: UNF

This week has been a very interesting and long week. The week started off with a boat ride up the St. Johns River. On the way back down then we then took water quality tests, which was good practice for the following day. The following day we had a 24 hour study that didn’t go completely as planned but being to be in the field and do the actually sampling was really nice. During the 24 hour study a severe storm came though and caused unsafe conditions to sample in. This caused the data to be skewed in the data analysis. Even with the skewed data some patterns could be observed to get a good sense of temporal patterns. The analysis of the data proved to be more difficult than expected and ended up taking the group of us much longer than perceived. Then the last day was a day full of learning about the beaches and coastal habitats. We took a trip to five different locations and learned about the differences between natural inlets and manmade inlets. The most interesting fact I found from this trip is that natural inlets actually naturally move up and down the beach. Then on the last day we reviewed all the material we needed to know for our quiz and finally took our final quiz. This week overall has been for informational and I am very satisfied with the knowledge I gained in sampling techniques and how to adjust to a situation in the field.