Amadi Afua Sefah-Twerefour won an award for best poster at her Discover UofSC session! Her poster examines rates of vessel strikes and fishing gear entanglement, which put the North Atlantic right whale population at serious risk of extinction. Amadi shows how these rates of human-caused mortalities change over seasons, over decades, and across the range of habitats that right whales utilize. Her poster also reviews the spatial coverage of right whale critical habitats, where protective policies are established to reduce right whale risk. Finally, she alludes to a new project that she is just launching to assess news coverage of right whale injuries and mortalities. This is such exciting work - great job Amadi!! Jasmine Witt won a Magellan Scholar Award to pursue her project with Kira Telford on Pacific gray whale foraging ecology. Kira developed a novel method using photographic tools to measure blubber thickness in individual whales. Jasmine will apply this method to a group of 11 whales that return to the Puget Sound each summer to feed on ghost shrimp. In addition to validating this new health index methodology, Jasmine and Kira will examine changes in blubber thickness throughout the foraging season, as well as interannual variability in this important health metric. Jasmine's work is also being supported by an Honor's College research grant, and she was recognized this spring as a NOAA Hollings Scholar. Congratulations Jasmine! Today students showcased their research at the Discover UofSC 2022 conference! Abby, Amadi, Kira and Jasmine each created posters on the research they are conducting. Topics included Abby's work developing models to study individual movement patterns in right whales and Amadi's research examining spatial and temporal patterns in vessel strikes and fishing gear entanglement. Kira and Jasmine described novel methods and displayed preliminary results of a photo-processing tool to assess blubber thickness in Pacific Coast gray whales. We celebrated the conference and the end of the school year with a barbecue. Amadi learned to play corn hole and then promptly beat us Americans at our own game. Ben Aland won an award for Outstanding MEERM Student (internship track)! This summer, he will be working with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources conducting aerial drone surveys to monitor shorelines and oyster populations. Ben's primary deliverable will be a manual for DNR employees defining the workflow for drone operations and post-processing to identify oyster reefs. Ben will also create training data to support future efforts for developing a machine learning algorithm to automate oyster classification. Finally, Ben will use these drone images to assess a DNR test site to determine whether scattering shell hash can support new oyster settlement. Way to go, Ben! |
AuthorErin Meyer-Gutbrod is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina. Her lab researches human impacts to marine ecosysems. Archives
April 2024
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