December 6th, 2002: The Final Presentation was today. It was held in room 34-101 at MIT from 7:30 pm to around 10:00pm.December 5th, 2002: With only one day to Final Presentation, Mission 2006 members met at 34-101 (where the Final Presentation will be held) to do our final rehearsal. It was held from 4:30 pm to around 11 pm.November 24th, 2002: The Water Team met today to discuss our progress. We mainly edited our Water Final Document which will be incorporated into the Final Mission 2006 Document (ie. "The Bible").November 21st, 2002: As the deadline for the Website and Presentation is coming up, Mission 2006 decided to divide the members into new groups addressing specific topics that we thought were important. The new groups include: Logging, Mining, Agriculture, Ranching, Pollution, Tourism, Infrastructure growth, Demarcation of Indigenous People, Law Enforcement, Energy, Cycle Equilibrium, Indexation of forest's overall health, website, presentation, and characterization editors.I will be working on Indexation of forest's overall health. We will try to come up with a monitoring method that will enable us to evaluate the forest's health. Right now, we are considering PVA (Population Viability Analysis) as our main option.
November 9th, 2002: Our Water Group started to work on making our Final Document. We are trying to come up with a coherent document about the Hydrology of Amazon Rainforest using the data we have collected and the website we created.October 27th, 2002: Our team (Water Team) has been working on our team websites. Mainly, we have gathered information about how to monitor the water system in Amazon Basin. There are some sites in the Water Team website related to the researches that I have done. Here are the lists of research results posted on our team website which may be an interest for you.Links to Team Water Research Website:October 22nd, 2002: Unchat Session The Brazillian Mentors told me that studying all the community of fish is a good indicator of the quality and the chemical compostion of the water. However, as a member of the water team, I believe that this is somewhat not practical since studying all the communities of fish will take up too much time, effort and money. So, as I have mentioned in my previous research, I believe that using parasites as indicators of water quality and chemical composition is a good idea (To learn more about this, click here!) However, I believe that relying on only parasites as indicator is not desirable. Therefore, I will research more about some of the major species in the water to find which one (if there is any) would be a good indicator species.October 22nd 2002 : Check MY RESEARCH PROGRESS to see some of the new researches I have done during the past week. (Notes from 3 articles) Recently I have been studying ways to monitor macro-organisms in Amazon River. In addition, I have studied about the commercial value of Amazon River's Macro-organisms. Therefore, here's summary of some of the articles I read about the monitoring of Aquatic life.
Now our team has decided to find some ways to monitor the water system - especially about water quality, rainfall, chemial composition of the water and bio diversity/population which could be indicator of the quality of water. Therefore, my research now changed focus from finding information about the aquatic biota to learning different ways to monitor the micro-organisms in water to learn about the quality of water.September 25th, 2002: Discussion about our Research Progress Decided to discuss about Carbon Cycle and Methane with AIR group (Team 7)
For next meeting, Ryan will bring detailed maps of Amazon.
Future Plans: Define "well being of water" and find ways of monitoring the water system as we research; Classify the areas based upon levels of deforestation, ecosystem, rainforest, chemical composition, etc. and develop layer of maps.
