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At the beginning of the summer, I was not totally
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sure if the marine semester would happen or
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It was really up in the air as was literally everything, but I signed up for
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it anyway because it makes you feel like you're a part of something bigger
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There's so many branches off of marine biology or marine sciences.
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And you kind of want to dip your toes in everything and what the marine semester
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does it, it kind of just shows you what these actual field researchers are doing.
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Every block is an intensive research class.
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So you're out there collecting data, you're going out in to the field.
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>> In a normal semester, you don't have the time to spend one day out
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So the marine semester allows to only take that one class at a time for
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a short period, and sort of devote all your resource to that.
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Our program managers have done a really good job of adapting the program
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>> The field work and the lab work are proceeding almost exactly as before.
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You wear your mask, you keep your distance,
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but other than that, it really feels almost like normal.
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Estuaries and
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nearshore systems is a really great view in to how the marine semester works.
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You're doing really exciting, engaging work, but
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it feels just like a fun field trip into the mud with your friends.
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We measured the impacts of disturbances on the marsh.
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So I specifically worked to measure the length and
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the density of different marsh plants in an area that had been covered by mud and
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So by doing that, every year for the last few years and
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continuing we can see how the marsh is able to grow back and
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that tells us a lot about how the marsh will be able to stabilize after climate
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change induced flooding, or increased frequency of storm events.
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>> Marine urban ecology is a class that focuses on how the city of Boston
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A lot of the times ecology tries to take humans out of the equation, but
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we can't just ignore the fact that we're here and
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that we are actively changing the ecosystem.
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And so what we did was we went down the three rivers that feed into
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the Boston Harbor, and we looked at water quality.
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We looked at how much trash is on the riverbanks and we tested for salinity and
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temperature and dissolved oxygen just to see the health of the rivers and
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the health of the rivers tells us a lot about what is being fed into the ocean.
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So typically the tropical marine invertebrates class travels to Belize and
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collects samples that are brought back and later processed.
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This year because we were unable to travel,
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we had the really unique opportunity to take those samples from previous years in
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>> So we're looking at the sponge communities in mangroves
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the different symbionts so things living inside of the sponges.
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It's a lot of scope time, but it's always fun to learn new taxa, new species.
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I didn't expect us to actually be in class.
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So it's nice that we kind of jumped over that hurdle and
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>> Normally at this time in coral reef dynamics,
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we would be snorkeling in Belize every day and crystal clear
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waters to learn about how coral reefs function in real life.
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So we would be seeing what fish live there,
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what organisms live on the reef, how the reef survives.
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But now, because of the pandemic, we have to do that virtually.
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So, what we did on the first couple of days of class was collect a bunch of
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objects that we have in our rooms and build the Great Terrier Reef.
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If we could then learn how to use the software that everyone who went
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to Belize in the years prior use to create photo mosaics,
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a bunch of pictures stitched together to create 3D replications of the reef.
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This is a way that is really good at analyzing data from reefs
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that you can't necessarily get while you're in the field.
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>> I think what I learned about myself through this is that it is okay for
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And when it doesn't, that is just an opportunity to learn something new.
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>> I've absolutely been amazed at how well this semester has gone.
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We're all very happy to still be here doing meaningful work.
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>> I've now seen effects of rising sea levels,
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I've seen ecosystems start to decline and it's confirmed that you know that
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