Research at the Sedgwick Reserve for UCSB; My experience

Context

The coordinators of the “University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) Smithsonian Scholars Program” came to Moorpark College for an informational session, of which I attended, and then applied. As stated on the official website, “The program aims to engage diverse students in experiential learning centered on multi-disciplinary conservation strategies, biodiversity research, and green careers in STEM.”
The Program offers:

• New participants join our Early Research Experience Summer (¡ERES!) Program where they are introduced to rigorous STEM content and a network of researchers, instructors, and peer mentors.
• During the academic year, new participants must attend our seminars and multi-day workshops on professional development and academic opportunities such as internships or fellowships.
• Participants in “good standing” have access to resources beyond their initial program year and after graduation.
• Program affiliates support participants in preparing for post-graduate professional and academic opportunities.
  
  

Following the interview and acceptance, as well as various workshops and orientations, the data science (ERES) section of the course started June 16th, just last week. After two weeks of online discussion and homework, we met as a group for the Sedgwick trip! The major goals of the trip was to learn more about field research, collecting data, and preparing it for analysis.

Day 1

I carpooled with Rae Rush, a mathmatics major at Oxnard College, and we went to UCSB together for the required CSEP Workshop. Specifically, CSEP PD: Engineering Exceptional Talks.
CSEP, or rather, The Center for Science and Engineering Partnerships, provides “activities that include efforts to increase participation and diversity in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields, both to improve general scientific literacy and to meet national workforce needs.”
The CSEP workshop was incredibly insightful, and broke down the ideas I had from high school about presentations. Keep it simple, direct. Use as little ink to convey as much information. Use pictures and diagrams, avoid bullet points. In high school, it was about design and bullet pointed presentation. We left from UCSB around 1:30pm, and arrived at Sedgwick at 2:30pm. Rae, Bryan (another person carpooling with us), and I were the first group to arrive. We settled into our sleeping arrangements; some of the students were in the viynl tents, and some were camping in regular pitched tents (it was first come, first serve).

Then, we all were given a welcome presentation and safety instructions regarding the facility. It transitioned into the background introduction on acorn dispersal and acorn woodpeckers (of which heavily populate the area) provided by Dr. Scott Sillett. The presentation went in depth as to the relationship and territorial patterns of acorn woodpeckers, which was fun as it was entirely new ideas to me.

We got field ready, and took off to set up the camera trap and audiomoth. Everett and I se up the camera, and other members of our group (the students as a whole were split into 3 groups) set up the audiomoth. We had dinner, and prepared for thr next day.

Day 2

Day 2 started early, since breakfast was 6:00AM-6:30AM (but since my tentmate was on breakfast crew, I was awake earlier than that.)
By 7:00AM, we were field ready, and went birding. I used Cornell’s Ebird app to make a checklist and track the birds we spotted. For periods of time we were quiet, I used Merlin Bird ID to tell what birds we were hearing by sound. It was relatively accurate, although it was cool how our group leader could do something similar by looking and listening; we joking referred to him as “a human Merlin Bird ID.” The hike was intense, but I had the opportunity to learn a lot about the research process. Essentially everything was new to me, so all of it was fascinating.

We had the option to return to the site or continue hiking, and despite the heat beating on us all, the majority of the students chose to press on. We had the opportunity to see the Oak trees and how they garner wildlife in the wilderness.

After we returned and had lunch, we had a “UC nature overview” presentation provided to us by Cristina Soto Balderas. While it did not pertain to my field of interest, it was still an interesting discussion to listen in on; all of the environmental majors seemed enthralled by what Balderas was sharing.

We went for an afternoon hike, and had some social time after that. I had an intense headache, so I slept until I had to get up, as I was on dinner crew. I took some advil, and I was back at it again a few hours later. The dinner we made was “Mexican rice (v), refried beans, black beans (v), carnitas, guacamole, tortillas, salsa, Impossible patty/sausage, and salad.” We then walked to see the “mermer” or “murmur,” where at sundown, flocks of birds shift from tree to tree in schools (as in, they move the way large groups of fish do) and made unique shapes and sounds as a whole. I enjoyed it throughly, and it left me wondering if I could recreate the 3d-like shapes the birds make (with their movement) using math and some visualizations program. The way the birds move cannot be entirely random if they have evolved to move in such a way, after all.



Once the sun had set and the birds had settled down, we went back to the campsite, and we had the rest of the night to ourselves (with quiet hour starting at 10pm or 11pm). We made (and burned all of the) s’mores, then we stargazed and searched for barn owls. I burned my energy on an intense pickleball/tennis game with another student, in the dark with nothing but our headlamps guiding us.

Day 3

I woke up early and prepared breakfast with my group, had breakfast, and got field-ready all by 7:00am. We retrieved the Audiomoth and the camera from the field, and returned to the main hall. I volunteered to use my computer to review the pictures we got of the nights prior. We captured deer, bucks, foxes, and coyotes. It was exciting to see how many we would capture in a shot at a time. Then, Mario Castellanos, who was mentioned earlier as the expert in this field, gave us a task; To create a data table for analysis based on the raw data we collected with the devices. I quickly developed an efficient system with our team, and we sorted our data in the following columns:

• File_Name
• Animal_Observed
• Animal_Count
• Shot_Burst
• Time_Hr
• Time_Min
• Time_Sec
• Month
• Day
• Year
• Temp_C
• File_Type
  
  The file_name was absolutely necessary since it serves as an individual id or key to each entry/row. The “animal_observed” column exists because we already know we never had more than one species in a shot at a time. The “shot-burst” was not very helpful, but we included in to be safe. The time, seperated in such a way, is done so it is computer readable and easy to work with. The temperature was in celcius, hence the name. The “file_type” was also uneccessary, since every file that was entered from the camera was a jpg, and could have been included in the “README.md” instead.
  
  Note: While we did not make a literal markdown file in Google Sheets, we worked with what time we had and did leave some clarifying notes and information about the data.
  
  

We then presented the data, sharing how we organized the data into a readable, usable format. The critiques provided to us/things to consider next time was:

• Crew Name, field data recorded by, camera type, camera serial number, bearing in degrees
• latitude and longitude, elevation, site ID, data and time of retrieval
• SD card id, # of images captured, battery charge, battery type, etc
• moon phase and cloud cover (affects the animals we are observing)
  
  
  
  
  
  From there, we cleaned throughly, packed, had lunch, and departed home.

Takeaways

I had the opportunity to learn so much from this expedition. I learned about setting up research tools, collecting data, formatting data, and facts about the environment we are observing as well. I am grateful to the UCSB Smithsonian Scholars for providing this opportunity, and I look forward to working with them more in the future. Thank you for reading, I will see you next time. :)