Starting To Cross Some T's and Dot Some I's

This week has been all about making small progress toward major tasks. We have a lot of upcoming deadlines and we are working to reach those by drafting reports, adjusting figures, running new calculations, and holding meetings to discuss these items. Our biggest task is preparing a project report for peer review, followed by an annual reporting requirement. The project report is the result of our Tipping Points model runs and evaluation, which you can read more about on my Research page. Our team is currently writing and editing our narrative of how Bonnet Carré Spillway operations affected oyster mortality as simulated by our ecosystem model. This project reconstructs the northern Gulf of Mexico ecosystem from 2000-2017 and then evaluates how oysters-and other animals not involved in our report-respond to altered salinity and temperature regimes in the Mississippi Sound from the Spillway operations. This is my first time working on a report that will not become a journal manuscript, as this report will go through a slightly different peer review process and our end product will be a scientific report; think more similar to a government report or document and less like a scientific journal article.  

Our annual reporting is to wrap up our year 2 of the MissDelta project. While this project started two years ago, our team is ending our first year of work, as we delayed our start time so that the field collections team could gather data needed for our modeling work and so that some of the economic and management partners could organize their ideas before we started working on the modeling component. This delayed start is especially important because unlike the Tipping Points project where our team proposed model scenarios to run, the MissDelta scenarios will come from partnerships and conversations with community members. Until we know what management scenarios they'd like to test, we can't complete model runs for the project, except to help prepare the model for these future scenarios. The annual reporting, though, is a key component to a project of this size-38 experts across 14 institutions (plus postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates)-as it informs our funding agency of our progress, challenges we've faced, and ways that we've approached obstacles along the way. 

Finally, I made more progress this week with my oyster mortality side project. I got the physical data from the model neatly packaged into files, I got additional physical model data to use as a potential alternative, and today I gathered more data. Why so much data? The resolution, or spatial and temporal detail, of each of these data sources are quite different. While I would love to use the most detailed models with daily measurements at really fine spatial scales, those data are not always available. Therefore, I've grabbed three different sets of data to explore so I can decide which best suits the needs of this project. 

I don't know what we have coming up in the near future at the lab, so I can't say what the focus of next week's blog will be, but stick around to find out. And, as always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions or thoughts.