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Student Interviews Describe NGA LTER Science

We’ve posted a new video in the NGA LTER YouTube channel. In it, some of our graduate students (and one post-doc) describe what inspires them about working on NGA LTER science. Through these student interviews, you get glimpses of our fieldwork and what makes life aboard R/V Sikuliaq so special.

Michele Hoffman Trotter and her team collected these interviews while sailing on our Summer 2021 Sikuliaq cruise. They were also able to film the nets, instruments, and water samples that we use to investigate the NGA ecosystem. We played the video for our Site Reviewers in August, and now you get to see it too. Enjoy!

NGA LTER Women in Oceanography Featured in Network Article

Megan O'Hara
NGA LTER graduate student Megan O’Hara.

Western Washington University graduate student Megan O’Hara wrote an article for the LTER Communication Network, which was featured in November’s LTER Network News. The article Women in Oceanography: Highly Accomplished but Still Underrepresented features the NGA LTER‘s own Suzanne Strom, Kelley Bright and Ana Aguilar-Islas.

Megan is a master’s student studying phytoplankton in the NGA. Her thesis is titled “Cryptophytes in the Northern Gulf of Alaska: an analysis of distribution and regulation of mixotrophy.”

Link to the article.

Article my Megan O'Hara
LTER Network Communications.

Recent Outreach and Media Items

Media Stories

For our recent report to NSF, we compiled this list of media stories about the NGA LTER:

Education

When Michele Hoffman Trotter, Columbia College, participated in our April-May cruise, educators and home school parents were invited to enroll in her educational series, Expedition Gulf of Alaska! The learning modules were geared for grades 5-12. They were titled:

  1. Changing Climate Changing World
  2. Biodiversity: Our Lives Depend on It, and
  3. Plankton to Whales: How Energy Flows in the Environment.

Enrollees received a PowerPoint presentation on the topic, teaching activities, a supplemental reading list, links to the daily video uploads, and access to a forum where students could post questions to the science team and receive answers.

Schools in Alaska (Chugiak and Seward), California (1 school), Chicago (4 schools), and Canada (1 school) participated in this pilot shipboard education program aboard the R/V Sikuliaq. Her audience also included 24 homeschooling families in California and 32 adult participants. In Michele’s outreach team, Carlee Belt served as a media and education specialist and Katherine Brennan served as the cinematographer. All together, the team provided 15 daily dispatches from the ship – videos of ship operations and sampling equipment and interviews of scientists and crew. Additionally, they collected footage for the on-going Microcosm film project that will feature the diversity and roles of microscopic life in the ocean.

Alaskan teachers were a special focus of this educational outreach. Therefore, we recruited a middle school teacher in Seward (the port the Sikuliaq departed from), a high school marine biology teacher in Chugiak, and a middle school teacher from a Fairbanks watershed-themed school. These teachers were asked to pilot at least one module and will provide feedback that will help develop virtual field trip products.