It is pretty insane that this summer internship is almost over already! I have spent the week mainly working on my final poster for the intern poster presentations. Frank sent me the tile drainage data from the first six weeks of sampling so I began by going through the data and figuring out how I wanted to present it in my poster. I then worked on making some graphs and figuring out the overall layout of the poster. Since I have been working on so many different projects this summer I decided that I wanted to break my poster up into three different sections. I have sections on the rainfall simulation project, the tile drainage project, and the different education events I helped with. The poster making process has been time consuming, but I have also had fun figuring out how to best present everything I have done this summer. In next week’s blog post I will share the final poster.
On Tuesday I spent the morning with Carlos and Camron on the rainfall simulation. Since the results from previous weeks were somewhat inconsistent between trial repetitions we were testing a new method. This time instead of putting five trays on the rainfall simulator we only put three at a time. This method ensured that there was no splash over between the pans. After the trials we only weighed the jars and did not take water samples since this was just a test of whether there was more consistency between the trials in terms of runoff and infiltration. This method takes much longer though since for each set of treatments you need to run two rainfall events instead of just one.
I left before we finished this set of trials since I had to meet Janice in Cortland. Janice and I drove to the Broome County Fairgrounds and I helped her set up a table on what a cows diet consists of. We then attended a meeting with people from extension, soil and water, board of tourism, and other departments. In the meeting we learned about the 4H program in the county and all the different agriculture education programs they have implemented. We then took a tour around the different parts of the fair.
Once my poster was mainly done I started spending time creating a mini report summarizing the tile drainage data that we have so far from last year and this year. I am looking closer at the weather events that occurred at the time of sampling to determine if concentration and flow rate are related to the storm events. Hopefully the sampling project will continue for future years and a more comprehensive report will be created.