Save the Bay Internship
Providence, Rhode Island

Summer 2006

This summer I interned for Save the Bay, an environmental organization based out of Providence, Rhode Island. Their goal is to restore and maintain the Narrangansett bay and its watershed. My title was habitat restoration intern. I was in charge of monitoring four different sites around the state. Every other week I, along with one other intern, would go out to each site and take salinity measurements throughout the marsh. In order to take salinity measurements, I would extract salt water from the ground around the well and then put the sample on a refractometer, which gives salinity measurement readouts. I would then record the data. A healthy marsh generally would measure in the high twenties and low thirties for parts per million of salt. Most of the measurements I received when monitoring would fall between 0 and 25 ppm. The main reason for the marshes’ degradation is development, which cuts off the natural flow of salt water into the marsh. As a result of low salinity levels, an invasive species named phragmites grows freely. The plant spreads quickly and is a dominant species, meaning it restricts growth of natural marsh plants and often kills them.

Other than field work, I was responsible for inputting the data that the other interns and I had collected into excel documents. I then compared the data we collected to data from past years. With the comparison I sometimes created graphs and charts to demonstrate either the progress or further degradation of the given marsh.

Another project I worked on was to look at various environmental organizations and see what kind of information they had published about climate change. This was in order to help Save the Bay publish information on what people could do to curb global warming and reduce climate changes’ effect on the Narrangansett bay.