It was a busy summer spent finishing up the field and lab portions of my last dissertation chapter! I collected cores from the nearby Goleta Slough and members of the SBC LTER collected cores from nearby kelp forests for use in my sediment bioreactor setup. If you're interested in learning more about my findings, I'll be presenting the results of this project at the upcoming 2020 Ocean Sciences Meeting.

The LTER community Instagram recently featured SBC LTER researchers, field sites, and ongoing projects based out of UC Santa Barbara, myself included. Check it out!

Last week, Katherine Le graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a B.S. in Biological Sciences and a minor in Earth Science. With generous support from the Worster Award, she completed and presented an independent project examining the contribution of zooplankton excretion to giant kelp forest nutrient budgets. She has been an invaluable member of our laboratory group for the past few years, contributing to numerous dissertation and summer REU projects, and she will be greatly missed. However, she's already embarked on her next adventure! Just a few days after graduating, she flew cross-country to start her new position as the Environmental Data Initiative Fellow at the Lacawac Sanctuary and Biological Field Station. Congratulations Katherine!!

Each year, I compile a list of resources (listservs, jobs, etc.) for my students to help them get a jump start on the summer. Check out the most recent version now posted to my Teaching page.

Check out our new paper in Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science, published as part of their special issue on sandy beach ecosystems. Our study examines how beach hoppers (Megalorchestia corniculata) break down giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) and generate significant amounts of nutrients for the surrounding ecosystem. Congrats to co-authors Kyle, Lila, Jenny, and John!

Last week, I attended the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) All Scientists' Meeting in Asilomar, California. Not only was it my first chance to drive up Route 1, it was an opportunity to meet fellow scientists working at various LTER sites across the country (more on the network can be found here). I presented a poster describing some of my recent work examining nutrient cycling in kelp forest sediments and participated in a number of collaborative workshops. I also mentored an NSF REU student from UMass Amherst, Julia Cox, who received a fellowship to attend the conference and present her work on temporal shifts in zooplankton communities along the New England shelf. All in all, it was a fantastic conference, and seeing humpback whales breaching from our porch at breakfast didn't hurt!

A few weeks ago, I attended the ASLO Summer Meeting in Victoria, British Columbia with the Melack/MacIntyre lab family (that's us in the first photo!!). It was a whirlwind of talks, posters, and plenaries, and I presented my research examining lignin phenols as biomarkers of terrestrial organic matter in Santa Barbara Channel marine sediments. I had the opportunity to meet researchers from all around the globe as well as several current lab collaborators and fellow early career scientists. Now, I'm back in Santa Barbara and hard at work prepping for August field work and experiments. More on that soon!

Two of my undergraduate students are beginning a new chapter in their lives this week -

Chloe Smith is graduating from the Oregon Institute of Technology and is the recipient of the President's Senior Cup, awarded to an outstanding scholar in the Humanities, Arts, and Sciences who has demonstrated superior academic excellence and involvement in university organizations. Lila Kubler-Dudgeon is graduating from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and shortly afterwards, she flies to Thailand to embark on her year with the Princeton in Asia program.
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Congratulations to these amazing young ladies! I could not be prouder of you both!