Laying the Foundation

Hey everyone! Week 3 now, time is flying by. I can’t help but think what I would have been doing if we were able to travel to Costa Rica. First of all, being able to be with Paulo and Andrew in person would probably be a big help. I think a lot more can get done with in person communication, and that is really what I miss the most right now. But we would also be able to travel around the country and see places where landslides occurred which would be a really big help to understand more the different types of landslides and causes. We would also be using the drones for imaging and mapping, which would be a cool experience. I have never done field work and am look forward to being able to one day. Right now since I can not be in Costa Rica I rely on google earth for getting me familiar with the area.

This morning me and the rest of the cohort met up on zoom to discuss how we have been doing this summer and where all of our research is at. It was really interesting hearing about the two other projects and I wish we all got to hang out in person. But it was really nice being able to see them on a tiny box screen nevertheless.

Then in my meeting with Andrew, Paulo and the rest of the landslide group we discussed our abstracts to be submitted to attend the AGU virtual conference. We will submit an abstract that will include the overall understanding of landslides in Costa Rica and hopefully creating a probabilistic model from our data. If there was no pandemic, we would be traveling to San Francisco to attend this conference, but virtual will have to do. It is a bummer because it seems like it would be a great networking opportunity as well as a chance to speak to others in the landslide field that may be able to assist in our research. Hopefully, we can go to a conference in the Spring. Writing this abstract gave us more of a foundation and helped us determine our end goal and timing for this project. I am excited to have a more structured plan now, and can't wait to see what's next!

Below is some practice I have been doing on QGIS to find the area of landslides. This is at the Miravalles Volcano in Costa Rica! I need to hand draw the polygon shapes over the landslide area which is seen in purple. Thank god I have a mouse for this laptop!

Lea