State Fellow Lorraine Anglin Finds Her Niche
Former California Sea Grant State Fellow Lorraine Anglin as a volunteer kayak naturalist program for the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
Credit: Lauren Hanneman
January 2007 – Before completing her California Sea Grant State Fellowship, Lorraine Anglin’s past work experiences might have seemed a bit disjointed.
She had spent summers working on salmon tenders in Alaska, had been a research associate at a molecular medicine laboratory and also a legal assistant at a firm specializing in maritime law. She was also, at the time she applied for the fellowship, in graduate school at the Center for Marine Biology and Conservation at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, finishing a master’s thesis on the potential impacts of offshore aquaculture on marine biodiversity.
Her resume clearly showed a long interest in science and the sea, but her skill-set had yet to be assembled into a cohesive package. That is what her fellowship at NOAA’s Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary has helped achieved. “It put the pieces together,” Anglin said.
“I decided to apply for the fellowship because I was interested in marine policy and science,” she said. “My advisers thought it was perfect, given my diverse work experience.”
“I anticipated the fellowship would be focused on policy,” she said. As it turned out – and by her own choice – she ended up planning and leading a cruise for testing an instrument for imaging fishes and habitats on the seafloor.
“It was exciting because it was not something I was expecting,” she said.
The instrument she worked on was an underwater video camera system, known as a towed camera sled, previously used by geologists to look at the seabed. Her job was to modify its data collection protocols. This required, among other things, modifying the instrument’s software to make it appropriate for its new task of recording biological data.
The first field test of the system was at a place called Portuguese Ledge, an area of the sanctuary that at the time was being considered for inclusion in the state’s Central Coast marine reserve system. She both planned and led the cruise and the subsequent data analysis.
“We wanted to evaluate the quality of the habitat and to ground truth our data against USGS maps,” she said.
Portuguese Ledge is now part of the state’s newly designated Central Coast marine reserve system. The video images that Anglin collected will provide a baseline for monitoring the area after the new regulations are in place.
“We are trying to create a tool that will allow the sanctuary and the state to monitor marine reserves,” she said.
Anglin’s fellowship ended in Oct. 2006 but the sanctuary extended her internship until April 2007.
In recent months, she has continued to improve the camera system and protocols for monitoring with it. She has also led two more surveys of areas over Soquel Canyon and off Big Sur that federal managers have suggested be part of a federal marine reserve system. “The images will help inform their decision-making process,” she said.
This is exactly the type of science she hopes to continue to pursue in the future.
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