This is me...and my colleague Alisson (a BIG help). One of the previous posts I tried to explain to you what my method was going to be for sampling fish and inverts. Well, you're looking at it. In this particular area we are actually off the airboat and tossing the throw trap in to a marsh pond. Exciting, I know! You can see just how dirty we got out there in the marsh, but it was worth it. What ended up happing was I divided the restoration site in to 4 areas. 3 restoration method areas (excavated mounds w/ deep surrounding water, excavated mounds w/ fill from dredge material, and pumped mounds from dredge material) and 1 reference area. In each area I performed 3 replicate samples, everytime doing exactly what you see in the picture above and the picture below. Trust me, it wasn't a cake walk. Once we slid the bottom net under the throw trap, we then had to lift everything up out of the water enough to be able to sift through the mud, algae, and vegetation. Sometimes all of the got up to around 50lbs of "stuff." We ended up just lifting the trap and placing it on the airboat to sift through. First we collected all the fish (one site included a big ole blue crab; in another we captured a gar), after the fish and inverst were collected in a separate bag we then scooped up all vegetation (and sometimes mud) and put it in to other bags. In all this took us about 2 days of 4-5 hrs of work. Fun, fun! Next, the vegetation transects. Three of them, 1000m in length, a point intercept recording every 5m, and 2 percent cover quadrats every 100m (one for emergent veg. and the other for SAVs.) But enough of that, lets look at some more pictures. Take care everyone!
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