Promoting Research Investigations in the Marine Environment: Bridget Begay - Week 6: Analyzing Coastal Data, OIMB and Cheesy Bread

Hello everyone!

Let's start this week with the progress of the project. Since we have completed the Quality Control on all of the beam trawl data, we are taking the next steps to analyze the data. To interpret the all of the late 70's data, we will specifically be using species diversity measures, which measures biodiversity in plant and animal communities. Species diversity is broken down into the following concepts: richness, evenness and heterogeneity. This week, I learned about species diversity measures, specifically Rarefaction Method, Simpson's Index, Shannon-Wiener Function and Multi-response Permutation Procedures (MRPP). We are using these species diversity measures because we would like to analyze the all of the Oregon Coast beam trawls as a community. Each one of these functions can be calculated by the R program. The R program is a programming language software used for statistical computing. Learning about these methods was very new to me and challenging to understand, but I know these techniques will be very useful in the future as a researcher.
We organized the four bays (Umpqua, Siletz, Tillamook, Alsea) and coastal data because we wanted to look at the species diversity separately to get concise results. With each analysis, our group looked at the significance of the grouping of data and species diversity. Here is an example of an analysis of the coastal data, excluding bay data. We organized the coastal data by 6 different depths: 0m-10m, 10m-20m, 20m-30m, 30m-40m, 40m-50m and 50m - Maximum m. The MRPP resulted in an A value = 0.03225 and a p-value = 0.001, we can infer that that the groups are more different than expected by chance. This means that the grouping of each of the 6 different depths species composition is more different than if you were to take a random sample from all of the data.Also at each depth, we statistically analyzed the species composition with the Rarefaction (Species Richness) Method, Shannon-Wiener Function and Simpson's Index. One trend that we saw was that the Butter sole (Isopsetta isolepsis) has an increasing presents with a depth of 30m-40m but then decreases to deeper depths. I think it's exciting to see the results of the community composition of the beam trawl surveys taken by Head Scientists, Earl E. Krygier and William G. Pearcy in the late 70's. Look forward to seeing our full results of the coastal and bay data on our presentation!
This week also included a road trip to Oregon Institute of Marine Biology (OIMB) in Charleston, Oregon with all of the HMSC COSEE Interns. The drive was long but worth it since we got to tour the whole campus. We were able to attend Peter & Leyia's sample collection at Cape Arago State Park and their lab, classrooms and labs filled with marine organisms. It was great getting to know what research is being conducted at OIMB and seeing the progress of everyone's projects. There was a lot of interesting things to see, like the stuffed sea otter, a lower humpback whale jaw and the mysterious marine organisms in the Shank's Lab. We also had a very delicious lunch at the cafeteria, which it did live up to it's reputation from OIMB COSEE Interns. This trip was a great insight to the OIMB campus and where I will be attending in the future when I transfer to University of Oregon.