Dr. SEED recap

No time for blog posting during the 7-day field excursion to Willapa Bay, WA (with a quick side trip to Netarts Bay, OR on the way home). Too many early mornings (5:30 am), afternoons spent biomass processing and entering data, and trying to stay awake via massive cappucino intake and walks on the beach. John, Jeremy and I made it back last Thursday, and Sally was with us for the first 3 days of the trip. We had a great time, and data collection was fruitful. We are very grateful to Sally, who is in full support of our coffee needs and camping gear requirements - after a stop at REI we now have the most deluxe car camping kitchen ever assembled!

from the top: 1) pre-coffee, 2)post-coffee, 3)even Jackson is addicted,5) in case one method should fail

Beach walks

The Willapa project is a bit of a side project for me - looking at the effect of dredge oyster aquaculture on eelgrass. For the time being I refer to this projects as Dr. SEED (Dredging, Seeds and Eelgrass Demography). Funding for this work comes from WRAC (Western Regional Aquaculture Center), who has been funding this project for the past five years. The general foci of this research, spearheaded by Sally, Jen Ruesink (UW) and Brett Dumbauld (OSU/USDA) has been to understand how different types of oyster aquaculture affect various aspects of eelgrass demography and ecology. Lori, my former labmate, looked at early life stages of eelgrass (i.e., seeds and seedlings), and their success in different aquaculture types (i.e., hand-picking oysters from the sediment, attaching oysters above the sediment along lines, and harvesting oysters with a dredge). My current project is to look in greater detail at dredge aquaculture, and how it affects the various life stages of eelgrass (adult densities, flowering shoots, seedling and seeds). To do this we are going to follow these life history stages through time at three sites in Willapa Bay which are subject to a range of physical conditions: Stackpole, Stony Point and Nemah. Unfurling/untangling the GRID over a dredged bed

Sampling along the DRID on an eelgrass reference bed

Each of these sites has an oyster bed that was dredged this past winter as well as an adjacent contiguous eelgrass bed that we will use as a reference bed. We want to know how fast eelgrass can re-colonize these beds post-dredging, how the demography of eelgrass in dredge beds compares to that of the reference bed and how other physical and biological characteristics of the dredge beds may affect their recolonization potential. This research is important as it will provide greater information to oyster aquaculture management about the effects of dredging; specific to the eelgrass populations of Willapa Bay.

Fieldwork consists of unfurling and positioning da GRID (masterfully constructed at CRS in a hot-tub) on the ground. This is repeated three times in each dredge bed and adjacent reference bed. We sample sediment and eelgrass at all the cross-hatches of the GRID. All the GRIDS are aligned in the same orientation so that in the future we may be able to extend the sampling unit to other areas of the dredged beds. These beds are permantently marked and will be re-sampled throughout the next couple of years, during different seasons, to catch all the primary life history stages of eelgrass.

Ok, enough with the explanations, I've also posted a bunch more pictures with captions here: http://picasaweb.google.com/margothl/07_07_01_WillapaDrSEED
Most photos curtesy of John and his fancy new camera.