This continued funding for estuarine Marine Protected Area (MPA) monitoring will allow for further refinement of pilot protocols and support critically important long-term monitoring of an understudied suite of MPAs in California's Network. Data collected during the 2023 season will inform the development of the MPA Monitoring Action Plan and provide insight into climate impacts and resiliency of the MPA Network to climactic perturbations within estuarine systems.
This continued funding for estuarine Marine Protected Area (MPA) monitoring will allow for further refinement of pilot protocols and support critically important long-term monitoring of an understudied suite of MPAs in California's Network. Data collected during the 2023 season will inform the development of the MPA Monitoring Action Plan and provide insight into climate impacts and resiliency of the MPA Network to climactic perturbations within estuarine systems.
Sonoma State University (SSU)’s EdEon STEM Learning team and Physics and Astronomy Department, together with the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, will enlist a team of citizen scientists to explore and characterize how superheated gas (plasma) flows through the corona and chromosphere. Over 100 citizen scientists will be trained to take photographs of the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse. After the eclipse, the project will provide over 1,200 eclipse photos to scientists and the public.
The 2023 Summer Tinker Academy is a two-week program designed to engage and inspire middle school students through Maker principles, to encourage the exploration and development of technical, mathematical and artistic abilities. For Summer 2023, twenty-four middle school students from across Sonoma County have been selected by CTE Foundation to attend the hands-on sessions to be taught by SSU professors and student assistants in the SSU Makerspace. They will participate in a variety of activities including coding, modeling, crafting, sewing, and building.
Kelp forests in the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary (GFNMS), specifically Sonoma and Marin Counties have declined dramatically over the last decade due to climate change and the cascading legacy effects of overhunting of sea otters in the 19th century. We and our partners at GFNMS and Moss Landing Marine Labs have developed techniques to successfully restore lost kelp forests.
The Family Nurse Practitioner Program at SSU offers a Master of Science as well as a Post Masters Certificate Program with a full and part-time option. The mission of our program is to serve the underserved populations in Northern California. With the help of grant funding we are able to provide an opportunity for Advance Practice Nurses in rural areas to become nurse practitioners while staying in their community to provide the care to those patients in need.
The Family Nurse Practitioner Program at SSU offers a Master of Science as well as a Post Masters Certificate Program with a full and part-time option. The mission of our program is to serve the underserved populations in Northern California. With the help of grant funding we are able to provide an opportunity for Advance Practice Nurses in rural areas to become nurse practitioners while staying in their community to provide the care to those patients in need.
The co-PI’s, Jennifer and Carmen, will be partnering with chemistry and mathematics colleagues from College of Marin, Diablo Valley College and UC Berkeley to combine adaptive learning technologies with a socio/emotional component to increase student learning and success in chemistry courses for students with limited prior experience. In this work, a common learning management system, Canvas, will be utilized to develop individualized online educational components that engage students to think and feel like a capable scientist and to provide faculty development to support growth-mindset an
This project will investigate the role of naturally increased endogenous carbon monoxide (CO) in a deep-diving marine mammal. Several species of deep-diving seals have concentrations of carbon monoxide (CO) in their blood that resemble the levels seen in chronic cigarette smokers. The proposed work measures the turnover of red blood cells in marine mammals as a potential source of CO production and examines the effects of elevated CO on the oxygen binding characteristics of blood and the regulation of mitochondrial metabolism during breath-holds.
Dr. Bentley and Dr. Clark will use new, emergent remote sensing technology (terrestrial laser scanners and unmanned aerial systems, i.e., drones) to acquire detailed measurements of 3-dimensional forest structure in coastal and southern Cascade forests of northern California. These measurements will be used to: 1) rapidly and more accurately estimate aboveground biomass for a range of tree species and 2) estimate crucial fuels parameters to help validate or refine fire probability and behavior models across these diverse forests.
