Project:

Seaweed Species Richness Estimates Using Varying Identification Methods at Cooper's Beach, Southampton

Students:

Nicole Covino, Emily Burkhardt, Emma Filbry, Elizabeth Berka

School:

St. Dominic High School, Nassau

Mentors:

Pamela Shanley

Abstract:

The ability to identify species of seaweed as non-experts is very difficult because species of seaweed can all look identical and have fully different genomes. Being able to identify different species of seaweed is very important for reasons including being able to estimate diversity and figure out the health of the water. We hypothesize Cooper’s Beach will have high seaweed species richness because it is near a kelp farm that farms sugar kelp, a species known to remove excess nitrogen from the water. This study will investigate how species richness in Cooper’s Beach can be best interpreted using varying identification methods to assist non-experts. Sixty samples will be collected from the beach. Our team will separate the samples using morphological identification, which is identifying species based on their physical characteristics. iNaturalist will then be used on each sample to attempt to identify the sample. Our species richness estimates using morphological identification wil

Poster:

Team samples: