Seraiah ReisSeraiah is a general biology major, transferring to UC Santa Cruz from SRJC in the fall. This summer she worked with her mentor Tallulah Winquist. This summer, my mentor Tallulah Winquist and I did a review of the state of the science pertaining to kelp forests and their ameliorating effects on ocean acidification. I read a bunch of papers, took notes about them, and discussed them in meetings with my mentor. We organized the information we found to answer two questions: “What factors alter kelp forests’ ameliorating effects?” and “What factors help make kelp forests more resilient to climate change?” I am still uncertain what field of biology I want to specialize in. I’ve been fascinated by marine biology since I was a child, watching ocean documentaries and looking through this one marine biology book my mom had all the time. I thought this internship would be the perfect opportunity to get to know more about the field first hand. Even though my mentor and I weren’t able to do all that we hoped with her field work and data analysis, I wasn’t disappointed. I still learned so much from what we did with our review of the science surrounding kelp forests and their ameliorating effects on climate change. More generally, aside from all that I learned about kelp forests, this experience taught me a lot about various methods of data collection and analysis in marine science, especially those to do with carbon chemistry, photosynthesis, and stable isotope analysis. I’m much more confident in my ability to read and understand complex research topics. I was also introduced to R and learned how to do some basic coding and graphing on my own. I really appreciate all of the guidance and insight provided to me from my mentor and all of the speakers at the professional development meetings. Everyone was so supportive! Tallulah always made and asked such thoughtful comments and questions to help get me thinking about things from different scientific perspectives as opposed to just absorbing the information. And it was great to hear from everyone about their college and career experiences. I feel like I have a much better idea about what it means for me to be entering the field of biology, and what my options are in the future as far as grad school and research. I can’t wait to try to get involved in more research at my next college when I transfer this fall! Here are some interesting figures I encountered during my literature review... PC: Hirsh, H.K., Nickols, K.J., Takeshita, Y., Traiger, S.B., Mucciarone, D.A., Monismith, S., and Dunbar, R. B. 2020. Drivers of biogeochemical variability in a central California kelp forest: Implications for local amelioration of ocean acidification. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans 125: e2020JC016320.
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