This post is part of the LTER’s Short Stories About Long-Term Research (SSALTER) Blog, a graduate student driven blog about research, life in the field, and more. For more information, including submission guidelines, see lternet.edu/SSALTER
Tucked away off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, is the quietly beautiful Sapelo Island, home of the Georgia Coastal Ecosystems LTER site. For all of its perceived serenity, Sapelo’s marsh sprawls over thirty-eight square miles, sheltering diverse and riotous wildlife. It is hard to put into words how exciting and simultaneously peaceful life is in this hidden corner of the world. The best we can hope to do is take you along for a regular day on Sapelo Island…make sure to slather yourself with sunscreen!
Credit: Romi Drubetskoy
Rise and Shine
Let’s start our day at 8 AM on the UGAMI boat, surrounded by beaming (and not at all tired) faces. Our morning objective is to sample plots along the Altamaha River—work will include collecting jars of soil, obtaining temperature and light readings, and counting various plants. These plots have been around for twenty-five years now, so our research adds onto an ever-growing legacy. Estuaries like Sapelo house some of the rarest species on the planet, and almost 70% percent of sea life caught by commercial fishing lives in these marshes. Importantly for ecologists everywhere, a single acre of wetland can hold up to 330,000 gallons of water, halting sea level rise and harsh flooding. That being said, the tall Zizaniopsis grass that surrounds the plots can deliver a pretty nasty cut, so full-coverage attire is a must.
Save it For a Rainy Day
Credit: Romi Drubetskoy
Hopefully you ate lunch on the boat, because it’s time to go build some rain shelters! As the name suggests, these makeshift huts help keep out the rain from plots of land. After connecting a lot of PVC pipe, and layering plastic shingles across the top of our shelter, we’ll be able to simulate drought. After originally being used in a terrestrial prairie, these materials were slated for the dumpster. We were happy to give them a second life in the marsh to keep learning more about the effects of drought across ecosystems.
Have it Down to a Science
After a lengthy day, we’ll end up back in the lab. Fieldwork is fun and interesting, but you can never just leave those little jars of soil behind! We process those in two different ways. Cups of soil slated for organic content measurements are weighed, and then put along with cups slated for salinity measurements into a 60℃ furnace. Once all of the samples are dry, the cups face two different fates. Organic content samples will be crushed into a fine powder by way of mortar and pestle, a rather loud and strenuous process. The powder will then be moved into little crucibles that will be weighed once more, and put into a 200℃ oven. Then…you guessed it, weighed again! Through this process, we can burn off all of the carbon in each sample. This helps us see how much organic matter was in each sample, and infer decomposition rates! Back over at the salinity cups, we can find a large cup of deionized (a fancy word for pure) water, some pipettes, and a graduated cylinder. Each sample is mixed into a muddy liquid, and then let rest overnight. The next day, we’ll be able to come back to a layer of water on the top of each cup called a “supernatant”. This little layer will provide enough water for a reading on our refractometer. This cool device looks kind of like a long metal tube, which after you drop some water on the end of it, you can hold up to the light and get a salinity reading. This will help us tell how much salt is in the plots that we sample!
Wasting Away Again in Sapeloville
Credit: Romi Drubetskoy
We’ve done a lot today, and it’s time to leave work and spend our remaining daylight on the beach. On Sapelo, we’re lucky enough that even three people on the beach seems to be crowded. There are dolphins, sand dollars, and sharks in the water, but it’s perfectly normal to swim along the ocean’s inhabitants in uncommonly warm waters. Little ghost crabs will skid along the sand, and Atlantic horseshoe crabs litter the shoreline. A long day means a peaceful, quiet evening with friends, watching waves crash against the beach.
Co-author bios: Eamon Hennessy is a PhD student in Ecology & Evolution at the University of Houston working in the Georgia Coastal Ecosystems (GCE) LTER. His research focuses on how resilience varies across coastal marshes. Romi Drubetskoy is an undergraduate student studying Environmental Science, Computer Science, and Mathematics at Georgetown University. As a GCE LTER intern, she is helping multiple graduate students with their experiments on disturbance and recovery.
