iUTAH Undergraduate iFellows

 

Week 6 Recap

June 20-24, 2016

 

Joydino Beyale

My week 6 has been busy, I have been doing some lab work of my samples that I have collected from a recent rain storm.  I also put data into HOBO software and into Excel software of finished samples from various places that we collect data information. I also attended a training this week, the Confine Space Training, the training was to get permission to enter confined space on USU Logan Campus, steam vaults and man holds to conduct testing on rain water runoff from roof drains. And I was able to create a few diagrams of Green Meadows a place where we collect data and information about rain water, I also did a diagram of my own project, I used a software, Solid Edge ST8 to create the diagrams.

 

Heather Bottelberghe

This week I worked a lot with the infrared imagery software Research IR. With Research IR I can adjust the colors used to represent the pixels in the infrared video from Swaner Preserve. I have been working on finding a color scale that will best visualize the variance in temperature found in the water on Swaner Preserve. Working with software I am unfamiliar with is a fun challenge, and I enjoy exploring the different outputs as I adjust the palette of colors.

 

 

 

 

 

Katelyn Boyer

Monday through Wednesday I spent the day learned a little about forest plant identification. With a group from my lab, I traveled up to Skyline drive recording plant species in different study sites each under a certain condition. The first study sites were 2x2 meter plots consisting of a fenced and non-fenced area were we recorded what plant species were present or absent. By analyzing the data we will be able to see what plants are not growing due to grazing. The second set of study sites we visited tested what species of plants would grow in a burned area if different animals excluded from that area. Thursday and Friday I finished entering data from last week forest characterization and tried to figure out how to use the data to create desired figures for my poster.

 

 

 

Todd Brown

This past week was an amazing week for research! I was able to make multiple graphs for my recent research I have been working on. After finding the residual of the flow for multiple transects, I then made a sheet on excel showing a random transect and made a graph showing the residual for our Confluence and Morton sites. I was also able to make graphs for Stage Vs. Flow for the Confluence and Morton for each random transect and also I made a bar graph for each slope for the Confluence and Morton sites.

 

 

 

 

Darcie Christensen

This week flew by! Monday and Tuesday were spent reading papers about isotope values of arid climate plants to determine whether our results from IRMS were comparable. We definitely have some interesting and different results from what most people have when it comes to nitrogen, but the carbon values were on track. According to standard values, most of our plants were considered nitrogen deficient (which means the nitrogen content is less than 2%). Pratibha said none of the plants were yellow when destroyed, so we’re not sure what the reasoning is. I’m now working on analysis of the IRMS results to compare the amount of nitrogen in the plants with the amount of nitrogen in the influent and effluent to see if the results are reasonable. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were spent finishing up the allometric equations for each type of plant that was destructed. This will allow biomass to be predicted non-destructively for other samples taken from the plants. The values obtained for nitrogen and carbon content can then be related to the predicted biomass to determine total nitrogen and carbon content. Thursday, I also attended a meeting to learn more about Gas Chromatography. Treven, another undergraduate student, is working with Pratibha on taking gas measurements from the bioretention systems to determine N2O concentrations. I am most likely going to help when they begin taking samples if the equipment all gets here and working.

 

Georgie Corkery

This week has been very successful! Everything is finally all set up for my Hydroponics Lighting experiment! It took a lot of trouble shooting due to unexpected variables, but now there are three kale plants in hydroponic systems, three pepper plants in hydroponic systems, and three pepper plants in pots of soil each under grow lights indoors, in the biology greenhouse, and outdoors! Along with that, I have made many adjustments to the data collection method and am excited to watch the experiment unfold.

 

For the Home Hydroponic Kit project, my research partner and I went on a tour of a local hydroponic company named Harvest Squared. We had the privilege of taking a tour of their shipping container hydroponics unit, and asked a lot of questions. For me it was interesting to contrast the ecological footprint of this hydroponics farm to local organic farms and larger conventional monoculture farms. This hydroponics farm in a shipping container uses less water per yield, but the energy and nutrient input is quite high! This has furthered our interest in making a system that is more energy efficient as well as water efficient.

The environmentally sustainable Urban Agribusiness project has again shifted and transformed. After talking with my team and mentor, we think we have come up with a way to tie my projects together with past research conducted by my fellow research partners (also regarding water use in urban agriculture). I have been rereading through their research and want to use it all to fit into the generation of a large scale environmentally sustainable urban agricultural system model for Salt Lake. This way I will be able to showcase my experiments and look at the bigger picture.

 

 

 

 

Cynthia Elliott

We are almost at our goal for survey respondents! We went to a few parks in the Glendale neighborhood to get surveys and we actually had a lot of people take the survey. We were able to find the premium time to visit parks when there are the most amount of people there. A lot of our responses were quite valuable, as they were from people who frequent the Jordan River and surrounding parks. We also "set up shop" at the Glendale Library and were fortunate enough to intercept a fair amount of people going to a community meeting.  Dr. Brunson and Taya helped Luis and I fine tune our graph/images for our posters that we need for the Cohort Session on Monday!

 

Andrew Hackett

This was a relatively slow week of checking the data Heather and I had collected and exploring suitable ways to visualize the map. We also explored the use of other methods to conduct our study like Google Earth to re-examine portions of streets or check areas we may have missed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greta Hamilton

The beginning of the week was spent prepping the filtered methylmercury (MeHg) to be analyzed. There was a malfunction with the software and the MeHg run had to be aborted halfway through, and we had to remake the calibration standards. During the second round of analysis, there was only one sample that was rejected and the run provided useful data. Mid-week was spent prepping a total mercury (THg) run, which also is a two day process to be analyzed. Unfortunately, the THg run failed mid-run when the needle to the analyzer broke. All the prepped samples and standards had to be discarded. This will set back the data that I have available for my poster since my mentor will be out of town next week. Hopefully, we can get things up and running again before the end of the program. Thankfully, the filtered and unfiltered MeHg data is available for use and I won't be showing up empty handed to our meeting on Monday. Friday was spent in the field collecting our routine samples. Normally, we would collect on Thursday, but the biology department took the probe and we postponed sampling until its return. The probes did not make it back and we had to do our sampling with out probe data. We then returned to BYU to filter and acidify the samples making for quite a long day. This week turned out to be just slightly off with minor setbacks throughout but nothing that can't be handled. All in all, it has been a very insightful week as far as dealing with situations where things don't go as planned, and I am told this is more the norm than the exception.

 

 

 

 

Stacy Henderson

This week resulted in a change of plan for my project.  It was ultimately discovered that the USGS data set I had been working with was extremely complicated and didn’t yield a lot of results due to a lot of problems within the data.  So my mentors and I met and brainstormed a new rough idea that would utilize my GIS skills.  I started work on this new project on Tuesday and refined what it was going to entail with Joanna on Wednesday.  Thursday and Friday were spent creating rough drafts of maps that will show, geographically, different water policy boundaries within Utah.  I also began research on what entities within Utah govern which types of water policies for my research paper.  It’s been a stressful and busy week, but I feel I have a good start to this new project. Although this change has been difficult as it has come so late, I was able to get experience working with and analyzing difficult, incomplete data and learn a lot about why, scientifically, some of my ideas for that data wouldn’t work.

 

Rebecca Lee

This video is a fun example of what our water sampling efforts look like! We have taken samples from along the Logan, Provo, and Red Butte watersheds. The filters we use trap bacteria that is in the water. We store the filters in liquid nitrogen so that the microbial community will be the same when we analyze it in the lab as it was at the time we collected it from the river. Once we are back at the lab, we run various procedures so that we can identify if there is fecal contamination from humans, dogs, cows, or other ruminants in the water. With this knowledge, the watersheds will be able to be managed even better. It is interesting how much we can learn from just one simple water sample!

 

 

Gabriela Martinez

This last week has been challenging to say the least. I feel like I have hit a few bumps along the way and sometimes I worry I might not get everything done on time. But at the same time, I have to admit that it was heartening to see my mentor, near-peer mentor and everyone else in our lab come together as a team to help me brainstorm and find possible solutions to my research related difficulties. I am very grateful to have been placed in a lab where everyone gets along nicely and everyone is willing to take time off their own personal projects in order to help me.

 

 

Mitchell Steele

No Entry

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shanae Tate

This week I went with John and Thomas to TWDEF to put up the fence to keep the livestock out of the study site.  Most of the remaining time was spent with my good friend Microsoft Excel.  I have been making all sorts of graphs, cleaning up the data, and trying to make my water balance calculations work.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Luis Vidal

We started off the week by surveying at the Glendale library in the Glendale neighborhood of Salt Lake City. It was interesting to learn about the community activism in the neighborhood as we were told of how they recently overthrew their community council and are now very much active. Later in the week on Thursday we were intercepting people at Jordan park and that Friday we received many great responses at the Jordan Park free summer lunch event. 

 

 

Lily Wetterlin

This week I continued to work on preparing my samples for the water extraction line and mass balance.  I have been also working on my abstract, introduction and methods portion of my paper.  With this I have been researching papers published with similar questions in relation to mine. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Adam Whalen

Compared to my other weeks as an iFellow, this one was certainly less chaotic. Meaghan, my graduate mentor, was out on a much needed vacation in Puerto Rico. My research didn’t have any major breakthroughs either, as I continued with more coding. I began the week by cleaning up the remaining data sets I had collected earlier in the summer. This made the data suitable for comparison, and as such I began work on my cross tabulations. My initial results show some interesting differences between Utah’s attitudes toward water and the country as a whole. While I am not able to discuss any of those at length in these weekly updates, I can say that I am excited to share my findings more officially.

 

This week I also enjoyed a surprise or two in my Twitter feed. My fellow iFellows Mitch, Rebecca, Luis, and various others were tweeted out by iUTAH. Even though I regularly read up on everyone else’s research, it was still exciting to them pop up so unexpectedly. Of course I retweeted each post, but more importantly it prompted me to read up on everyone else’s weekly updates. One of the things I appreciate most about the iFellow experience is the diversity of exposure and experience. If it was not for this program, I would never be reading about the research experiences entirely out of my field of study. It is exciting, enlightening, and adds an extra level to my research that I do not feel I could get anywhere else.

 

Here in the next week or two I will have a fun video surprise for you detailing just what I mean when I say I “clean” my data. In the meantime, this picture of my coding screen will have to do!

 

 

 

Sandra Udy (Young)

This week was very busy! Monday Beth and I collected our NDS samples from the Provo River. These were brought back to the lab and separated into their different treatment types. Nutrient Limiting samples were put into cups to be analyzed for ash free dry mass. These NDS samples will also be analyzed to determine the amount of chlorophyll a on them from the biomass that grew. 15N samples were frozen to be taken to BYU for DNA-SIP analysis. Hemicellulose samples were placed in mason jars to be incubated for a week. These will be incubated with treatments of nitrogen, phosphorus, and a combination of nitrogen and phosphorus. The day 7 incubation will be compared with the day 0 incubation to see if the treatments of nitrogen and/or phosphorus impacted uptake of the hemicellulose. I started to learn how to use the Aqualog this week and in later weeks I will use it to analyze samples from the hemicellulose experiment. It has been exciting to see how the nutrients affect the biofilm growth. It will be really interesting to see which nutrients affect the biofilm growth the most. Lots of exciting things to learn!