About This Project
Monitoring the vital signs of our rocky intertidal community is critical to managing and understanding these valuable California coastal habitats. Unfortunately, funding to acquire such relevant data is scarce. But with the help of citizen scientists, we have been collecting data for the last 14 years. LiMPETS aims to analyze this citizen science data that was collected by high school and college students in order to show long-term ecological trends along the California coast.
Ask the Scientists
Join The DiscussionWhat is the context of this research?
LiMPETS is an environmental monitoring and citizen science program for students, educators, and volunteer groups throughout California. Over 6,500 teachers and students along the coast of California are involved with the collection of rocky intertidal and sandy beach data. The 30 targeted taxa include the Pacific mole crab, ochre sea star, sunburst anemone, sea mussel, owl limpet, abalone, and pink acorn barnacle.
What is the significance of this project?
14 years of intertidal data have yet to be analyzed due to budget restrictions. Help scientists analyze student-collected data by funding this project. Not only will you be contributing to California's coastal ecological knowledge - you will be empowering the thousands of students who participated in LiMPETS. We can't wait to show our students a published scientific paper to which they contributed!
What are the goals of the project?
We will examine the LiMPETS rocky intertidal data, specifically those collected at sites in the San Francisco Bay Area. We will examine questions like how have the abundances and size frequency of harvested species changed over the last 10 years? When did sea star wasting syndrome hit our sites? Have there been any spatial range shifts of species in the last 10 years?
This information will be presented to our teachers, students, environmental partners, and regulatory agencies. The report we produced will describe abundance trends and vertical zonation of animals and algae due to climate change, human extraction, and environmental conditions. Ultimately, would like to submit a scientific article to a peer-reviewed journal.
Budget
LiMPETS currently has enough funding to run our education programs, but we don't have the money to utilize the data we - and thousand of students - have collected.
Meet the Team
Affiliates
Team Bio
Monika Krach and Abby Nickels are excited to use their extensive knowledge of intertidal ecological monitoring to synthesize years of monitoring data by students.
Monika Krach
MONIKA LYNN KRACH is the Science Education and Technology Specialist for LiMPETS, working in the Greater Farallones region. Monika incorporates visual media such as film, interactive games, and website design into the teaching of marine science. She earned her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and a Master’s degree from Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Jaclyn Schneider
Jaclyn Schneider is the LiMPETS Program Coordinator for the Greater Farallones Association managing the Northern California LiMPETS region. She engages youth from middle and high schools, college students and community members in the San Francisco Bay Area with ocean science through LiMPETS, Long-Term Monitoring Program and Experiential Training for Students. LiMPETS provides experiential, science-based environmental education that empowers students to become informed and engaged ocean stewards. Jaclyn earned her B.S. in Marine Biology from Cal Poly Humboldt, where she managed a benthic ecology lab.
Additional Information
Please go to www.limpets.org to learn more about the program.
Project Backers
- 32Backers
- 100%Funded
- $4,505Total Donations
- $140.78Average Donation