URI
summer research fellow student assesses Westerly lagoon
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| URI student Hannah Madison poses in a lab where she conducted studies of algae blooms. (Photo courtesy of Amy Dunkle.) |
University of Rhode Island senior Hannah Madison is spending her
summer elbow deep in seaweed at the Napatree Point lagoon in Westerly. She’s
working to assess the seasonal variability of algae blooms and how it relates
to water quality.
It’s a project the Latham, N.Y., resident joined as one of
100 students from colleges throughout Rhode Island who were selected as Summer
Undergraduate Research Fellows.
Working in collaboration with URI Professor Carol Thornber and
postdoctoral researcher Lindsay Green, Madison spent the last 10 weeks
conducting algae surveys, weighing and measuring algae, and counting the marine
invertebrates that live among it.
“It’s an extremely interesting experience,” said Madison, an
ocean engineering major. “I learned so many different things that I never would
have known without it. And it was definitely fun working at the beach every
week. We never did the same thing twice, so it was never boring.”
Madison said that Napatree Point is an excellent location for
conducting studies on a wide variety of environmental topics.
“The place has so many rare species to worry about, so it’s
important to try to understand and monitor the beach and waters to make sure
those species can continue to thrive there,” she said.
During her algae surveys, Madison calculated the ratio of each
species of algae at several designated locations in the lagoon and collected
water data, including temperature, salinity and dissolved oxygen. Back at her
lab in Kingston, she dried the algae she collected to determine its biomass.
She found it difficult to draw many conclusions based on just a
few weeks of data, but she made a number of interesting observations.
“It was incredible the difference we found in the number of
snails from one site to the next,” she said. “It probably had to do with the
amount of nutrients at the different sites – those with more nutrients had more
algae, and the snails feed on the algae and lay their eggs there.”
Madison also observed a correlation between the total weight of
algae and dissolved oxygen in the water.
“When an algae bloom forms, you have a ton of algae growing, and
when the algae begin to die and decay, that sucks out the oxygen, so dissolved
oxygen levels shoot down,” she said. “But then when I went back the next month,
there was virtually no algae at all and dissolved oxygen was very high. It was
interesting to see the clarity of those results.”
Funding for Madison’s research fellowship was provided by the
Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) program of the
National Science Foundation, which has provided more than $26 million in grants
to support scientific research in Rhode Island. She presented the results of
her research at a conference at URI on July 29. The EPSCoR program is
administered by URI.
With just one more year of school left before graduation,
Madison is thinking about her career plans. She had intended to enter the
workforce, hopefully for a company involved in renewable energy, but her summer
fellowship also got her thinking about enrolling in graduate school.
“I definitely learned from the fellowship that I don’t want to
be stuck in a cubicle,” she said. “I want to be out there in the field seeing
what needs to be done and doing it. That was the best part of the project. We
were never just sitting.”