This team-taught course arose from a research trip to the Center for Coastal Studies in Baja California. For the past three years, Dr. Boudrias and his graduate students have been working in close collaboration with the School for Field Studies (SFS) on a research project quantifying the pollution impacts of a fish cannery on the sandy beach benthic communities in Puerto San Carlos. The cannery currently dumps organic and inorganic wastes into Bahia Magdalena. The majority of the impacts are apparent on the local beaches on the mainland side of the bay. In conjunction with SFS faculty and undergraduates, we have been monitoring the water quality and the benthic community composition at several sites in the bay. In March of 2000, Dr. Bolender joined the research team to help improve the quantification of the water quality analyses. Since then we have collected many samples that will provide the framework for our course.
During our first research trip to Bahia Magdalena, we saw the opportunity to provide USD Chemistry, Marine Science and Biology students with a unique interdisciplinary hands-on field experience. Thus the course is designed to integrate chemical principles with benthic ecology of shallow water marine habitats. The lectures will cover broad topics relevant to water chemistry and benthic ecology as well as specific topics affecting the environmental issues in Bahia Magdalena. You will learn a combination of laboratory-based and field-based techniques that will help you develop research skills that can be used to solve real life environmental problems. Furthermore, our course will continue the long-term monitoring of the water quality and benthic ecology of Bahia Magdalena and even provide some new comparative data.
Our backgrounds will influence the direction of this Honors "Pollution in the Sand" course. Dr. Boudrias' areas of study are in biological oceanography, fluid dynamics, and crustacean ecology. He has worked on many aspects of aquatic benthic ecology, human impacts on rivers, estuaries and beaches, crustacean functional morphology, and the fluid dynamics of locomotion in crustaceans. His main research interests are animal-fluid interactions, affecting both feeding and swimming, and the environmental effects of abiotic factors on coastal benthic communities. Therefore you will find that this course will combine physical characterization of habitats followed by the biological interactions that dominate each habitat in time and space. Dr. Bolender is a physical chemist whose areas of study include spectroscopy, chiral recognition, and quantitative analysis techniques. Since joining the USD-SFS research team he has developed a stronger interest in quantitative lab and field techniques that can be used to monitor water quality. His main research interests in this course and in these projects are the application of more rigorous laboratory techniques to field analysis. Therefore you will find that his contribution to this course will focus on quantification of results, the application of precise lab techniques to field data, and the impacts of chemistry on the shallow water beach communities.
