ARCHIVED STATUS REPORTS
9/23/2002
To prepare for our next meeting, each
person in the team will do preliminary research to help us better understand
our focus as a whole. I will be researching general fauna life
in the underground environment of the Amazon rainforest. In my research,
I will be looking for the biodiversity, basic environmental characteristics,
and biomass that exists in the underground of the Amazon.
9/25/2002
I wasn't able to find as many hard facts
on the biodiversity of the subterranean level of the Amazon rainforest.
We decided as a group today that categorizing the fauna by the
different environments wasn't the best idea, since fauna move around
too much, and too many of them overlap. In order to get more ideas
on how to categorize/divide our focus for Fauna, each member of the group
decided to pick at least two "indicator" species for a particular environment
that we assigned each other. The area I have to do basic research
on is "low order" organisms in the river. (When we mean low order,
we mean organisms that are low in the food chain).
I did particular research
on a particular species of Anchovy called the Engraulidae, which are
very small in size (about 1.4-1.8 cm in size). I did research on
another small fish called the Discus. Both of these fish were food
to the many larger fish in the Amazon river. Both of these fish also
fed on tiny crustaceans and other micro-organisms. I tried basic
research to find information on small crustaceans and micro-organisms
in the Amazon river, but could not find much.
9/27/2002
We had a team meeting today, and
discussed the different species we all did research on. However,
we still could not find a good focus for our project. We are mainly
having trouble with how to divide and monitor all the different fauna
in the rainforest. We threw around many good ideas back and forth,
but weren't able to come up with a decision. In the end, we all decided
to each individually write up a proposal on how we should approach this
project, and then discuss it at our next meeting.
9/30/2002
Today's class was a "Perspectives"
class where we discussed the different groups of people living in the
Amazon that have interests in the land. The discussion was in
the format of Role Playing as the different groups from Mission 2006 represented
the different groups interested in the Rainforest. Our group represented
the indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest.
One of our mentors, Bob Gurnitz,
were present in today's class, and we all stayed a little bit after
to talk to him. Mr. Gurnitz was a lot of help to us, and gave
us a lot of good brainstorming ideas we could play around with in the
next meeting.
10/02/2002
For today's meeting, we all decided that
each one of us individually would write out a proposal on what our group
would put our main focus on. We all had similar ideas, but I feel
that we didn't exactly accomplish what we wanted to. We are still
in debate about the best ways of characterizing and monitoring all the
different fauna. The different kinds of technology that could be
used in monitoring the kinds of fauna were briefly discussed. In the
future, we will research more deeply into such technology and techniques
such as satellite imaging, video monitoring, tagging, etc.
10/04/2002
We heard the other groups presentations
today and what their focus and goals will be. Hearing the other
groups gives me ideas on what sort of things our fauna group should concentrate
on in order to benefit the Mission 2006 team as a whole. Our presentation
will probably be on next friday, and the main thing I believe we should
focus on is to provide the hard facts and evidence involving fauna
that will help verify and promote our overall Mission 2006 project.
10/07/2002
Today's class was a Perspectives
class. The issue discussed in the reading was about "Avanca Brasil."
We discussed if whether the Avanca Brasil campaign is a generally
good idea for the overall well-being of the Amazon basin.
Outside of class, I have found
that currently, the most wide-spread method use for monitoring large
animals would be tagging. However, many questions start to come
up: What kind of data are we looking to collect? What species would best
represent this type of data? What is our purpose for collecting this data?
10/09/2002
Our group meeting today was mostly used
to prepare for our focus presentation in front of the whole Mission
2006 team on Friday. Our group's goal, as I have mentioned before
above in the introduction to this web page, is two-fold: to monitor and
characterize. In our presentation, we will discuss that the monitoring
and characterizing will be done on indicator species that will "indicate"
to us some fact about the rainforest. For example, amphibians are
very sensitive to the environment, and we could monitor a certain type
of amphibian to see how the environment they live is changing.
10/16/2002
In our search for the right indicator
species, our group decided that we need should identify the threats first.
We have decided to talk to the various other groups such as the
Land, Water, and Air group to find out what particular threats we should
look out for. By identifying these threats, we can use the indicator
species of the fauna to prove that the threat exists and is causing a problem.
10/23/2002
We met as a group yesterday in the library
to do group research, and aid each other on our individual researches. We
decided to meet again at Hayden libarary again on the twenty-fourth of October.
What I am currently trying to find in my research is find facts for
actual reasons on why we're going to monitor the particular species we chose
to monitor. So far we have chosen to monitor bats and amphibians.
Which specific species we are not sure yet.
10/30/2002
Our whole group met at an Athena cluster
today to work on our team web site. Our team web site needs a lot of
work, and we met today and set up a schedule. We planned for some of
us to get together over the weekend and solely work on improving our team
website. Other than that, we are continuing our research.
At this point, it has been decided that we would no longer be
doing weekly updates for our personal and team web pages. We would just
have one final web page for each individual and each team. Also
around Mid-November, all of us at Mission 2006 decided to form "new"
groups. Essentially, we all changed the way the work was getting done.
There were about two or three different proposals on how to change
the organization of the way were doing things. Two of them involved
creating a new set of teams.
The proposal we eventually voted on as a group involved creating new groups
that would better cater to our final presentation. What we would do
in our new groups is collect all our final research, solutions, and proposals
from our old groups, and re-distribute them for re-organization into our
new groups for the final solution/presentation. The new group that
I chose to be in was the "Indexation of Rain Forest Health" group because
I felt that I could contribute a lot to the solutions of this group with
the goals from our very own Fauna group.
The formation of these groups was a very good idea because I think it actually
helped everybody in Mission 2006 prepare better for our final solution to
the Amazon "problem." It was more effective because I think the groups
allowed for better communication amongst each other, and all linked together
better for our final solution.
For our report and solution that we came up with for the "Indexation of Rainforest
Health" group as well as the report and solution from our old Fauna group,
you can find them under
RESEARCH
.