News

This summer Alex Makic and Adrian Urrea have been working in the lab as undergraduate researchers.

Alex, from Colorado College, majoring in Physics with an Emphasis in Environmental Science, worked for a month in the lab on helping to analyze drone imagery taken above Los Penasquitos Lagoon and adjacent beaches to examine morphological changes over time as part of a California Division of Boating & Waterways funded project. He returns to college in early August, but has already made excellent progress this summer! In addition to working with us, he also worked with Octavio Aburto’s lab assessing Mangrove habitats in Baja California.

Adrian was part of a team of students who worked with Jeff Crooks and I during the 2018 Spring quarter to develop a bio-sensor. Adrian has continued to work in the lab this summer, further developing the sensor which will measure oyster shell gape to study how they respond to surrounding conditions. He is working to improve the sensor, add components (temperature and heart-rate sensors), finalize its calibration, run a field test, and build more of them!

18 – 21 June 2018, Giddings attended and presented at the NSF sponsored Workshop on the future of coastal and estuarine modeling. Presentations ranged from numerical discretization schemes, to nonhydrostatic versus hydrostatic code, to the state of the art in wave model-hydrodynamic model coupling. It was a very interesting several days discussing where we are in coastal and estuarine modeling and what are the major hurdles as well as opportunities ahead.

13 June 2018 – The EPA hosted a kickoff meeting for two new Border 2020 funded projects aiming to reduce coastal water pollution along the US/Mexico Pacific border. Falk Feddersen and Sarah Giddings presented an introduction to their recently funded Border 2020 Border Environment Cooperation Commission (BECC) project entitled: “Evaluating the 2017 Tijuana River Estuary cross-border wastewater spill sources and coastal impacts.” This work builds off of modeling work started during the CSIDE project, but is heavily focused on the applied aspects of this research, specifically understanding the sources and impacts from a particularly large spill that resulted in extended beach closures in early 2017. We got great feedback from stakeholders (government agencies, public, other research groups, nonprofits, etc.) and also heard more about a complimentary observational project SCCWRP is leading under the same grant program.

12 June 2018, Students completing the Master of Advanced Studies in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation presented their capstone projects at the Annual Capstone Symposium. Kelsey Miller, who Giddings has been working with over the Winter and Spring quarters 2018, presented her project: Tribal Intertidal Digital Ecological Survey (TIDES) Project: A Conservation Technology Partnership with Coastal Indigenous Nations Advisors: Dr. Jennifer E. Smith (Chair), Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Dr. Sarah N. Giddings, Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Megan Van Pelt, Natural Resources Department, Tolowa Dee-ni’ Nation; Clinton B. Edwards, Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Kelsey did an amazing job with the work and the presentation.

Forgot to take pictures, but we all went out to lunch as a lab to welcome Alma Castillo Trujillo for a short visit who will be joining the lab in September 2018 as a postdoc. Great to have such a wonderful group of people!!

For their senior design course in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (MAE126b) a group of undergraduates decided to work with Dr. Jeff Crooks (Tijuana National Estuarine Research Reserve Research Coordinator) and Dr. Sarah Giddings to design biosensors for oysters. During just one quarter, team members Adrian Urrea, Hsing-Han (Hans) Chung, Emma Schoenthal, Claudio Coleman, and Marika Hale successfully built a prototype that can measure the shell gape of an oyster!! Photos of their test deployments in the SIO seawater facility (thanks to Phil Zerofski, facility manager) and a link to their project website are here:

16 May 2018 – Tijuana Estuary Tidal Restoration Program (TETRP) meeting. TETRP is a multi-phased restoration for the Tijuana River aimed at restoring habitat through projects such as those aimed to increased tidal flushing. TETRP has already completed two major restorations and Giddings is a science advisor for the most recent phase of the program.

9-23 April 2018 – Nearly 2 m of sand accreted over our pressure sensor buried in the mouth of Los Peñasquitos Lagoon, making it 3 m beneath ground level. After recovering the sensor in the surfzone and attempting to recover the lagoon mouth sensor, we had to resort to heavy machinery. Since the lagoon mouth was in the process of closing, recovery was a priority before the lagoon filled with water and the recovery became impossible. After a couple long days in the field, the pressure sensor was successfully recovered!

Thanks to Erik Jepsen/UC San Diego Publications for some amazing photographs taken on the first day (before the heavy machinery!). And of course thanks to the amazing field crew – could not have done it without the immense efforts of Brian, Kent, Greg, Lucian, Rob, and Bill!

04 April 2018 – Kristen Davis from UC Irvine is leading a big study of Newport Bay and the exchange with the coastal ocean. After a far too exciting day in the field (fear of lost instruments), all moorings were successfully recovered!

23 March 2018 – Giddings was invited to give a talk at the SDSU Computational Science Research Center (CSRC). Meetings with faculty and students during the visit highlighted the amazing work they are doing there and some potentials for future collaboration!