Final week: UWF - Asplund

     To finish off the last leg of the trip, we stayed at UWF. I have never been to the panhandle of florida, so seeing hills in the area was definitely interesting to me. 

    Over the week, we worked with Dr. Caffery and Barbara and learned all about watersheds and creeks. On Monday, we explored the Upper Perdido creeks including: Pine Barren, Boggy and Brushy creeks. We also saw Lower Brushy, Jackson springs, Cow Devil, Jack’s Branch creeks, and Perdido river. On Tuesday, We saw Pensacola’s bayous and also did a small about of seagrass surveying before unfortunately being rained out. The next day, We joined a drone survey of seagrass beds. I found some really interesting remains while walking along the shore and have taken them home for souvenirs. We also got to learn about shorebirds and see their nesting area. To wrap up the day we visited a Turtle conservation center. On Thursday, we conducted the seagrass survey we were unable to do on Tuesday and enjoyed swimming around. During these surveys we used familiar tools such as secchi disk to measure depth, YSI multimeter to take water quality data, and quadrants to survey area coverage. 

Throughout this entire trip we have been using these same tools to collect data all over Florida and for different purposes. I’ve learned that no matter what your focus is in marine biology, everything connects in nature and you can use these tools to connect the dots and determine if there is correlation between issues and causes.