The STem Academic Research and Training (START) program at Wake Technical Community College (WTCC) allows students to be introduced to scientific experiments firsthand. Melinda Gibbs and I have such a program. We call it Aquatic Flora & Fauna (AF&F). This semester is the first time we can actually go in the field as our previous try was during the spring of 2020 and we all know what happened after the winter was over then …
This is with the land bridge behind us looking upstream. It’s actually right were we found the baby crayfish!
This time around we were able to head out. It was kind of a cold day (I didn’t think so but, coming from the Alps, I’m not a reliable baseline). Our study is comparing up and downstream of different disturbances starting with this land bridge on the South Campus at WTCC. We have four students, each one working on a different set of variables:
Shreeja is our invasive species expert (with a focus on plants) and works using a combination of transects and quadrats.
Kaleb is our soil expert (with a focus on pollutants) and works using a combination of transects and soil samplings approaches.
Ananya is our invertebrate expert (with a focus on macro-invertebrates) and works using a combination of kick-netting and water sampling followed by microscope investigation).
Katie is our water quality expert and works with a LabQuest interface and a set of probes to investigate conductivity, dissolved oxygen, temperature, pH, and turbidity (with a Secchi disk for now).
This is the stream wayyyy upstream where there is a huge work area to expand the highway belt around Raleigh. Yes, the entire stream you see in all of the other pictures goes through this bottleneck pipe …
For now, all I wanted to do is share the pictures of our first day :-).
We went back in the field for a second data sampling trip two weeks later (04/06). Finding more crayfish but generally more of everything … spring arrived!
