This week marked a transition for the SEES team, as we saw our last day out in the field. As such, it was a busy day collecting final samples and taking out all of the collection objects without replacing them. The plates I stripped of removable sediment and promptly threw away–along with any leeches that were attached to them. I finally got to take out my brushes, which went…interestingly. Not as smoothly as I had hoped it would go, but regardless, some data is infinitely better than no data at all. I also collected some live plants to run analysis on the attached flocculant, which I’ll tackle in the lab next week.

Today, I spent some quality time with SAFL’s sediment lab, and worked on separating some more plate bags between sediment and water. A top priority for me going into next week will be ashing these samples, and filtering the water from them. As I have a full set of samples from this week to handle now as well, it’s imperative that I move forward here as efficiently as possible. It’ll get a bit sticky working in two labs a t once, at EEB and SAFL, but it is what it is!