Working at AIMS

ABOVE: the view from my office, my excel spreadsheets, the guest house.

For the past week and a half I've been working at AIMS, located 40 minutes south of Townsville in the middle of a large nature preserve. Each morning, an AIMS car picks Rachel and I up in front of guest house and drives us to work. Since it is so far away from the city, AIMS employees are assigned to a car and carpool to work every day. Also, they get one day every other week off so they can run errands and do things that people who work in town can do more easily.
My project investigates the differences between inshore and offshore coral reef communities by analyzing photographs of 2 inshore and 2 offshore coral reefs in the Northern GBR that my researcher took last year; and also by looking at trends in temperature regimes of the 4 sites. It is our hypothesis that sea surface temperature of inshore reefs will be warmer compared to offshore coral reefs, and therefore, the former will have less hard coral and more macro algae.
For the first 3 days of my project I was literally sitting in front of a computer for 7 hours each day punching in numbers and equations into an excel spreadsheet. Now, I'm finally starting the benthic identification part of my project and using a special computer program called Coral Point Count with Excel extensions to accomplish this. With 4 reefs, 2 sites per reef, 3 transects per site, and 25 pictures per site, I have about 600 pictures to analyze...