When we were doing field work, one of our goals was to constantly update with results as they were coming in. This page shows the types of things we could report back to volunteers and collaborators during the summer.
 
Disclaimer: As a scientist, it can sometimes be hard to share data before you have time to check and double check it but, in this case, we felt like something was better than nothing. Please don't use any of these graphs as final results - we need to do lots of quality checks before they are ready to be published. 

2018 Field Results

We are excited to share our results in real-time this summer! After we have citizen scientists help us collect the bugs at each site, we bring them back to our house/lab and sort and identify them. Check out the graphs below to see what trends we are seeing from this summer!

Dragonflies are changing - but now we have more work to do! 

Want to dive into each site more? See below for the current breakdown of invertebrates at each site. 

Marshall Brook

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This site is called a brook but beavers have dammed part of the stream and created a wide wetland and the aquatic bugs reflect that! Check out the figures below to see a summary of our collection.
Some notes on what we are seeing:
  • The aquatic collections have stayed fairly consistent across dates, with amphipods and isopods dominating the sample numerically - but remember these are very small critters compared to large dragonfly larvae so make up less overall biomass! 
In the terrestrial, beetles have stayed consistent but the team has noticed that it's been different species of beetles at each sampling event. Something to look into more in the lab this fall when we can really dig into the identifications!

Schoodic Beaver Pond 

This beaver pond complex is out on the Schoodic Peninsula. It's a relatively small pond but it has a great diversity of aquatic insects and the riparian area around it has lots of great terrestrial bugs. We caught lots of dragonfly and damselfly larvae. Between our first and second sampling event, we saw a huge uptick in beetles and hemipterans in the terrestrial sample. 

Gilmore Marsh

Gilmore Marsh is a wide wetland just above Aunt Betty Pond. It is fairly shallow with lots of emergent vegetation so warms quickly on hot days. It's a beautiful place to work and offers sightings of many amphibians, reptiles and birds. We are finding a great diversity of invertebrates at this site! 

Hunter's Brook

Hunter's Brook is a beautiful, clear, fast flowing stream that empties into the ocean right below our site. Multiple visitors have stopped and told us how you can catch brook trout here. Our collections definitely show how clean this water is. We even found water pennies, which only can survive in unpolluted water!