Blog 4: turtle spotted
Lily H -
Hey guys!
This week was probably one of my most productive and most enjoyable weeks yet!
To start off the week, I finally began coding. I decided to model DC rainfall with turbidity levels from a station in the Anacostia river near RFK. Turbidity is the cloudiness of the water, which is often caused by suspended particles. Turbidity is often a test for water quality as the water clouds when pollutants and sediment enter the water. Since this was my first time ever writing in Python, it definitely took a lot longer than I expected. In the end, I was able to model the rainfall and turbidity level each day of the month of May.
The relationship between the two is clear. Each time there was increased rainfall, the turbidity levels rose too. This could indicate that increased rainfall could be correlated to lower river water quality. Last week, I spoke with Masaya Maeda, my senior project advisor at AWS, about the harmful effects of stormwater runoff, particularly how both in urban and rural areas it can pollute the streams that lead into the Anacostia River. This conversation gave me the idea to look into turbidity levels after major rainfall events. However, I do want to mention that this is just based on one month of data, and I obviously cannot draw any conclusions until I have done much more research.
Today, I went to another mussel surveying event, but this time it was right outside Heritage Island (the small island before Kingman Island). As you may remember, last time I mussel surveyed, I found 0 live mussels and a couple of shells. This time, I opted to follow Jorge, the AWS mussel leader, into the muckier parts of the river and I was able to find 4. He showed me how to identify their trails and where the best places were to look for them, like under logs. It was a very rewarding, but challenging experience because I got stuck in the mud up to my knee about 20 times and fell face first into the mud twice. It was super fun to explore this section of the river, as I live very close by and I go to RFK a lot, yet I had never been to Heritage Island before or looked in the water. Today, I was able to see the beauty of the Anacostia River and all that it has to offer. I saw 3 turtles, 1 Snapping Turtle and 2 Eastern Red Bellies, one of which I got to hold, a bunch of little fish, and about 6 diving birds called Grebes.
My goals for next week are to improve my model. After speaking with Stephanie Gamble, my math mentor from the American Mathematical Society, I am hoping to normalize my data so that the correlations are easier to see. In addition, I am hoping to input a lot more data. So far, I have the data from January 2022 to December 2022 ready to be inputted into a model. After I complete this model, I hope to investigate if climate change has had an impact on the water quality levels.
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