Marine Field Studies 2021: Final Blog and UWF Week

This course has been amazing and exceeded all of my expectations. I'm fairly new into my marine biology degree and have not had much experience at all, so getting to see so much of Florida along with meeting so many great students and professors was awesome. I definitely made some memories over this trip I'll never forget, and I've even started planning trip ideas to visit literally all of the places we went again. I'm so overwhelming grateful for this course and everything it came with as I feel much more prepared for a future anywhere in the marine bio world.

That being said I wanted to point out the different locations we visited and how they all connect. I'm a little bias and was very excited to see we started in Jacksonville and ended in Pensacola as I'm from UWF, so I didn't have to make a long drive at the end of this last week. However even reflecting on the differences in landscape and ecosystem between Jacksonville and Pensacola is very intriguing. Jacksonville was a fairly flat place sitting by the Atlantic ocean. That location made the beaches very high energy which meant large rocks/sediment and rough waves constantly. Whereas Pensacola is located in the Northern Gulf of Mexico and we have much calmer water and very fine sediment. Not to mention the very noticeable hilly topography as we traveled North during the week. Farthest South was the Keys. I loved it here but again it's landscape was very different than all others as we were literally on islands the whole time surrounded by the Florida Bay and Atlantic ocean. There weren't really any beaches here like other places; only short narrow sand patches or thick mangrove forests. As we traveled North to Ft. Myers the next week we did see mangrove forests again, but they were considerably smaller. Ft. Myers was beautiful with its almost always flat waves and beaches. We mainly studied the Estero Bay here which I found so interesting as we got to really see the functions and purpose the bay provides. Moving on to Tampa we didn't get to see much of the landscape as our field day was spent on the research vessel offshore. I liked the change in scenery here though as it was a shock from being so close to the beach to all of a sudden right in the middle of a busy downtown in a very large city. Lastly, our week in Pensacola was spent surveying the upper creeks and rivers and then making our way down to the bays and gulf. I learned much more than I thought I would this week and have developed a new found appreciation for our watershed system here locally.

Overall I would do this course again in a heartbeat to gain the experience and knowledge we did. Even through the stressful and sometimes sleep deprived days I feel like it only helped push us even further into our careers. I went into this course thinking I wanted to work in coral restoration and came out with a new interest in oyster spat, watersheds, open ocean research, sea grass beds, shark research, and most importantly water quality (I will never forget how to use a YSI multimeter ever again). I still have that interest in coral, but with complete confidence I would say this course has put in perspective just how important and intriguing each part of the marine biology world is. Thank you to all of our professors for contributing and organizing this course. I will never forget this opportunity!