Tidepools & Task Management for Earth Day

Planning
Yellow Island
Mussel Biomarkers
Mussel Methylation
Published

April 22, 2026

Plan of the Week: April 20 - April 26, 2026

High- level outline for the week. Adjusted daily to reflect progress of the day before

  • This week is all about intertidal invertebrates, mussel methylation and pulling off the UW-RUA professional development programming series.

Monday - 1v1 & Yellow Surveys

Tuesday - Yellow Surveys

Wednesday - UW-RUA & Event Prep

Thursday - UW-RUA Events & Methylation

Friday - UW-RUA Professional Development Full Day

Saturday - Methylation

Sunday - Methylation

Plan of the Day

Granular level task list to accomplish the high- level goal outlined above

  • My primary goals for today are as follows:
    • Celebrate Earth Day!
    • Set-up some small deliverables for today - Friday in each active project
    • Outline my agenda for next week’s 1v1 with Steven

Projects Touched Today

  • Mussel Biomarkers
  • Mussel Methylation
  • Yellow Island

Progress Notes

  • Today was a challenge balancing ongoing responsibilities while also carving out the time to prepare for the next few days.

    • I have large events for my student assistance-ship that are time sensitive as three of the four events in our professional development series are Thursday and Friday.

    • Big goal is not to lose momentum in my own work while not over-promising what I have the capacity to do.

  • I started the day working on event and traveler management.

  • Next up was lab meeting.

  • Following was a review of the biomarker draft feedback from Steven and making a plan of attack.

    • First - rework figure plan. I don’t have to make them currently, just evaluate and decide on what they should be to reinforce the main data takeaways.

    • Second is to rework the methods and results to reinforce why we made the analysis decisions we made.

    • Third step is to adjust the introduction and discussion to reflect the changes made in the methods and results.

  • Looking at methylation and DML results writing. The plan is to

    • Do a speed run on the abstracts in my Zotero library and identify the relevant papers that support my interpretation of the results. The goal is to have 2-3 papers fully reviewed on Thursday, 1-2 on Friday, and 4-5 on Saturday to flesh out a decent result section, and then identify where I need more support on Monday.

  • I completed the perfunctory parts of the NSF activities report, due May 1st, but will be reviewed on my April 28th 1v1 with Steven.

    • The first 7 of 9 sections in the report are pretty simple, so I knocked that out, earmarking the written portion of the report for Sunday completion.

    • I also grabbed a blank GSAR for completion simultaneously with the NSF review.

      • I knocked out the basic questions. Will complete the goals and activities on Monday prior to agenda submission to Steven.

  • Next up was more UW-RUA work and last minute logistics confirmations.

  • I shifted to a quick review of the Yellow datasheets before imaging and uploading to the Yellow project in Google Drive.

    • I spent some time reviewing MLLW levels across the next two tide series to draft a plan for maximizing survey times. Since the island experiences longer periods of time with the high and upper- mid tide lines exposed, front-loading the higher surveys (read: earlier start times) may help me reduce the more tedious workload for volunteers during the late May/ early June series.

      • On this trip out, I averaged 6 hours/ day surveying, and could probably get that up by an hour (about 8 quadrats of data in low, 10 in mid) on the next round before adding volunteer training on the third one.

      • This will reduce output pressure and supervision, and make room for line changes as smooth as the NHL…

      • The target goal for the total number of quadrats is 500 to keep it comparable with the 2023 - 2025 years of data collection. Breakdown is generally 100 in upper- tide, 250 in mid-tide (the largest section), and 150 in the low- tide.

      • Prioritizing volunteers in low- tide sections during the June series when the MLLW gets down to -3’ to -3.8’ is key, so knocking out the higher levels early on is crucial to hitting our goal.

      • Each quadrat in 0.5 meters x 0.5 meters - that’s a lot of snails to count!

  • After review, I had to laugh, because random sampling means this always happen when you drop your transect line…. so close to getting the star of the show, but forced to ‘ignore’ it because it is outside of your line!

Outcomes: Products & Word Count

  • Task Management

Today’s total: 0 words

Monthly total to date: 6683 words

Annual total to date: 39,356 words

Annual target total to date: 53,500 words

Next Up: Tomorrow’s Plan

  • Manage UW-RUA PD Programming Kick-Off and knocking out 2-3 papers to support the methylation results.