Unfettered

Now that it is the second half of the summer we have transitioned from working in the Andrews Experimental forest to working on the OSU campus. Last Thursday we packed up and cleaned up and permanently moved all our belongings into the dorms. Though living in the woods is always a great time Corvallis is a nice town so its not too bad. Plus it is nice being within walking distance of grocery stores, movie theaters, and other modern conveniences. Being in Corvallis does not however mean we are done with field work, just this Monday my group scouted our second site and developed a rough game plan for next few weeks. This week is data analysis week, which is what I've been doing the past couple days, while next week we get to try some different equipment at our original site. That's really about it for work, since I doubt anyone wants to hear about my battles with Mathematica. This past weekend I explored the town, went berry picking at a farm owned by the school, and played some

This has been rather busy as evidenced by the lack of posts. On Monday we drove around with a forest service guy named Ray. He showed us a bunch of log jams on the McKenzie and some side tributaries. Its amazing how well he knows the area and all the log jams. He kept coming up with sites to look at, we ended up driving back and forth over the basin. We found a couple of cool snorkel sites to look at fish behavior but none of the sites were really suitable for our instruments. Today we went back to Quartz creek (our main site) and took some more data. This time Jorge our math mentor came along and helped us try to come up with a way to create a grid of data. Suffice it to say it was a long and complicated process and only data analysis will tell if it works. We did get to use a total station to survey the points where we took data, which was pretty cool. This weekend I went to the Oregon Country Fair , which was quite a spectacle and tons of fun! I'm not really sure how to descri

First let me start out with a picture of the keystone of our research the ADCP, mentioned in at least one previous post. So this past week has been quite busy. Despite the day 'off' for the 4th we still have had a full week of field work. This has consisted of getting data with our ADCP and taking snorkel surveys of the fish populations. Since I'm the mathematician/Computer Science guy I've been running the laptop attached to the ADCP and only assisting with the snorkel surveys. Ginger our ecologist has been doing the real work and donning her 'not so dry' suite and swimming the river to catalog the locations and orientations of fish. My job has been to record her shouted observations since it is hard to take good notes on a dive slate. In fact this morning we completed the 24-hour fish survey of our site. Starting yesterday at 11:45 Ginger would snorkel the pond and report her findings. She did this every 4 hours for a total of 6 surveys. Since some of these to

One of our projects key piece's of equipment is an ADCP which stands for Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler. Basically its a $30k piece of equipment that uses sound waves to determine the velocity profile of a stream. Unfortunately the version we have is really designed to be mounted on a boat and used in deeper waters so we were unable to get it to work yesterday. I did get to use some surveying equipment to plot points along the logjam and stream bed though, which was cool. Today was a reading day for me, mainly documentation on the ADCP model we have and the one designed more for our project type. Tomorrow its back to the field to see if my new knowledge helps us collect any usable data. This evening there was an HJ Andrews potluck which was fun and a nice change from the basic cooking I've been doing. I got to talk with some of the long term workers as well as members of the other crews stationed here. I brought a basic vegetable platter, but other people got more creative