iCoast
Lauren is graduate student studying Coastal Engineering at the University of Florida with Dr. Angelini. Lauren is contributing to the iCoast project by studying the boat traffic and composition in the highly traversed Intracoastal Waterway adjacent to the Guana Tolomata Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve (GTMNERR) through a solar powered video monitoring system. Lauren works directly with the citizen scientists and research coordinators at the GTMNERR for weekly video data collection and observations of the daily activities on the highway to the ocean. The Naval Research Laboratory is collaborating with Lauren to explore techniques of video analysis for environmental monitoring with the goal of designing machine learning software to automate data collection.
As part of the iCoast sensing team, Taryn calibrates and deploys YSI EXO 2 multiparameter water quality sondes into the Matanzas River and adjacent black water creeks for continuous water quality monitoring. She manages and distributes the collected data to other members of iCoast for further analysis and modelling.
Taryn is a MS student studying Soil and Water Science in Dr. Todd Osborne’s estuarine biogeochemistry lab at the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience. She received her BA in Coastal Environmental Science from Flagler College.
Carlos Manzanas is working with Dr. Hugh Fan on the development of a platform consisting of sample preparation and molecular detection of bacteria in water with minimum intervention, with an ability to integrate with a drone or other sampling vehicles.
Carlos Manzanas is a PhD student at the University of Florida’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and part of the Interdisciplinary Microsystems Group (IMG). He received his BS in Mechanical Engineering from Northern Illinois University.
Elise Morrison is a part of the iCoast sensing team, and will be using sterols as biomarkers to detect coastal health hazards.
Elise Morrison is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Florida’s Department of Geological Sciences. She received her PhD from the University of Florida's Soil and Water Sciences Department and her BS from University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on the microbial ecology and organic geochemistry of wetland and coastal systems and the relationship between microorganisms and biogeochemical cycling.