The Wrack

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 10/4/2015.

Just about every two weeks, for the past three years, I’ve gassed up my car. On the printed receipt from the pump, I write down the mileage from the trip odometer before I reset it. Every few months, I take all the receipts out of the Altoids tin I keep them in and enter them into a spreadsheet – gallons, price per gallon, location of fill-up, miles driven – and use it to calculate my average miles per gallon, and where the reliably cheapest gas is. Embarrassingly, I’ve even graphed the ebbs and flows of my refueling fun.

What can I say? I like math; I like numbers.

Volunteers measure river conditions at 20 monitoring sites as part of a statewide program.

Compare these two snapshots from the South Cascade glacier official USGS long-term monitoring site in Washington state:

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 1/5/2014.

Quite possibly the best movie l saw in 2013 didn’t open in 3,000 theaters, didn’t have a Morgan Freeman voiceover, didn’t follow a hobbit and his ring.

For the last 6 years, myself and a group of trained citizen scientist have been monitoring marine invasive species on docks, rocky shores, and tide pools as part of the Marine Invader Monitoring and Information Collaborative, or MIMIC.

Hi Everyone,

Thought I would share some numbers from our System Wide Monitoring Program (SWMP) weather station here at the Reserve, and compare them to some values from around the area. First off, it seems we got "lucky" with rain fall totals. Both the Reserve station and the Portland International Jetport weather station reported just over an inch of rain on Tuesday. However rainfall totals varied a bit depending on where those "bands" of precipitation hit… pretty minor event as far as actual rainfall goes, but when that rain is being blown sideways at close to 60mph. Speaking of wind…

Fellow Research Intern Tim Dubay and I have been working with Jeremy Miller this summer to expand the Wells Reserve’s ongoing larval fish project. We're "Team Larval Fish!"

We saw a cold and wet start to the month of June here in Southern Maine. I thought I would share some SWMP data from a few of our stations to illustrate how weather can significantly impact the water quality of our estuaries

Goal

Determine the presence or absence of diadromous rainbow smelt and appropriate habitat within the restored area of Shoreys Brook

Project Period

March and April 2012

So looks as if we got a bit "lucky" and missed the brunt of Hurricane Irene as the storm passed to our west dropping large amounts of rain on western New Hampshire and parts of Massachusetts and Vermont. Here are some totals from our System Wide Monitoring Program (SWMP) weather station behind the Coastal Ecology Center.

Aboard the EPA Ocean Survey Vessel BOLD to do ichthyoplankton monitoring at sea to supplement the nearly weekly ichthyoplankton tows at Wells Harbor.