Halfway through my second full field season in Ecuador! The halfway point of a field season always feels like the crux, when goals are starting to be achieved, and yet there's still so much to do. If a PhD is a marathon, then each field season is like another three mile chunk you have to get through on your way to the finish line.
So far this season, I've been resurveying stream sites that I surveyed last winter for macroinvertebrate communities, basal resources and physical habitat data. In the intervening time between my 2015 and 2016 surveys, huge landslides hit many of our study sites below 3000 meters in the Papallacta drainage here. See the photos below for an extreme example at Guango, one of our most disturbed sites. I'm interested to see how communities have rebounded from this disturbance, and subsequently to understand the mechanisms behind their response.
To better understand the mechanisms driving community recovery after landslides and floods, I'm doing a drift net study to quantify dispersal across my study streams, using some awesome drift nets that a fellow grad student helped me make. I'm also starting a pilot recolonization experiment in the coming weeks, so fingers crossed that this part of the field marathon goes smoothly.
So far this season, I've been resurveying stream sites that I surveyed last winter for macroinvertebrate communities, basal resources and physical habitat data. In the intervening time between my 2015 and 2016 surveys, huge landslides hit many of our study sites below 3000 meters in the Papallacta drainage here. See the photos below for an extreme example at Guango, one of our most disturbed sites. I'm interested to see how communities have rebounded from this disturbance, and subsequently to understand the mechanisms behind their response.
To better understand the mechanisms driving community recovery after landslides and floods, I'm doing a drift net study to quantify dispersal across my study streams, using some awesome drift nets that a fellow grad student helped me make. I'm also starting a pilot recolonization experiment in the coming weeks, so fingers crossed that this part of the field marathon goes smoothly.