Our week at UNF in Jacksonville has been awesome so far.  We learned so much about the beaches and the estuarine environments in the area.  There are many man made inlets that open into the Atlantic Ocean from north Florida such as St. Augustine Inlet and natural inlets such as Matanzas Inlet south of St. Augustine.  We also learned about the small town of Summer Haven and their high risk of wash out.
     On our second day we boarded two vessels that were deployed to gather information on turbidity, salinity, temperature, conductivity, chlorophyll concentration, depth and conditions in the brackish and marine environments surrounding Jacksonville the St. Johns River.  In order to do this we used equipment such as a vandorin bottle for water samples, a YSI multimeter, a secchi disc, and a plankton net.  After obtaining water samples and data at each of 6 locations up and down the St. Johns we rendezvoused back in the lab to obtain all the data for each location and have a look under the microscope at the varied phytoplankton and zooplankton collected on the plankton tows.  Many species of centric as well as pennate diatoms were seen.  Also, a great deal of zooplankton were spotted and identified.
     On Wednesday we travelled to GTMNERR for a 24 hour sampling exercise.  The main objective of this overnight research was to observe the natural trends in species richness, diversity and water quality with the change in tide, temperature and available light/nutrients.  For this exercise we conducted a seine net pull every 3 hours in a location above and below the dam.  In order to obtain more accurate data each seine was pulled just off the shoreline ~30 ft and then back onto land in the same location.  I noticed that our larger samples were at dead low tide when the seine was swept through the mudflats. Many species of benthic dwellers such as grass shrimp and bay whiffs were identified during most of the seine pulls.  It was challenging to get accurate measurements and counts on all the species gathered in the seine nets but the group as a whole really worked together to identify all the fish and get as many back to the water safely as possible.  In addition to gathering live samples at each of the locations by the dam we collected water samples every 1 hour and took down YSI reading for temperature, DO, and salinity.  All of these values will be assessed and put into graphical form so we are able to see more closely how the estuarine environments change in turbidity and chlorophyll concentration as the temperature and tides change.  I am looking forward to identifying all of the genus and species for our samples collected in the lab and also seeing what trends we may come across with our water quality data.

Pictures coming soon my computer has run out of memory.