And Finally He Ran Out Of Ideas For Blog Titles

Today we spent the day fleshing out the ideas for our research foci. We started out with a group discussion with all of the professors, where we each presented our ideas informally and received feedback. It was interesting to hear what everyone had come up with, and although the group format left a little to be desired in the way of efficiency, I was personally glad to get to hear everyone’s ideas. After reiterating my interest in hydrology and some discussion, I came around to the idea of trying to calculate the water budget for the watershed. This would not only help further our understanding of the interactions between surface water, ground water, geology, and topography as a group, but lend important information to those working on other hydrology based projects. Although I was still interested in freshwater seeps, I realized quickly that given the overlap between most of the hydrology based projects, I would still get to be involved in the seep research. After a break in the afternoon, the hydrology people met in a smaller group let by Dr. Becker and Dr. Wechsler, and we went over some of the specific methodologies and strategies that would be necessary to complete our research over the next 10 days. It was a very interesting discussion, and I was glad to have the one on one help. Tomorrow I will be focusing collecting ground elevation data within the riparian corridor for the purpose of increasing the accuracy of the DEM. Hopefully this will allow me to conduct more accurate analysis of expected surface water contributions to baseflow within ArcMap.