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Unlike you or I, the trees, birds,
ecology and geology of a forest have no voice. Without the power of speech, how
can we be heard. I wish to give our forests a voice and a chance. As humans, we
may bite the hands that feeds us, but without consideration of where our resources
come from it will not be long before we find ourselves without.
So, that’s a good question. What do
I want my IRP to be about? I want to find that ever present link, between land and
sea. What is it that so intimately connects them? Without one we cannot have
the other. Now I imagine there are plenty of people out there who could tell me
exactly what it is I am looking for and the answers after all are probably only
a moment from my fingertips. So, with my time in this class I wish to find this
link. 
Nice, Garth. Please remember to put captions on your pics so readers will know what they are supposed to be viewing.
ReplyDeleteHey Garth! I'm an EST graduate who once stood where you stand and here's some basic thoughts regarding your IRP (which is a great idea, btw):
ReplyDelete1. You want to understand the connection between sea and land, so a great place to start is with the sand! (see the word play I did there hehe) The composition of the sand varies greatly between beaches. Flagler beach has sand composed of what I remember being 50% lithogenous and 50% biogenous material and Ormond Beach, only a few miles south, has sand composed of approximately 80% biogenous and 20% biogenous material and then head a few more miles south and Daytona Beach sand is composed of roughly 90% lithogenous material and 10% biogenous. You see the pattern and if you have the ability to travel around FL, you can have various samples which could also be sieved and made into a very pretty graph of some sort.
2. From the perspective of land, you can look at the vegetation as a hint to what the relationship with the coast is. Some beaches are lined with scrub habitats that house gopher tortoises, cacti and even scorpions! Other beaches are lined with sea-grapes and mangroves, both protected species used to protect the coastline from erosion. The present vegetation can also hint as to what species of marine life or seabird can be found in that area.
3. Perhaps you can gather soil samples (different from samples collected for sieving, if you choose to do that) and test the salinity content and make a correlation between soil salinity (which is something that I'm not even sure can be tested for) and vegetation present. This idea comes from the fact that some plants, such as mangroves, have a high tolerance for saline environments whereas others do not.
That's all I've got for now, sorry for the extensive post! Good luck in your studies.
For Ormond Beach I meant 80% biogenous and 20% lithogenous!
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