Welcome to CONES, the California Online Naturalist Event Series. This series is created by and for California Naturalists and Climate Stewards to connect across the state on topics including natural history, ecology, climate change, and the intersections of pressing human and environmental issues. While we're not checking IDs at the door, we're also not advertising beyond our community of certified California Naturalists and Climate Stewards to ensure we create a space to connect and grow together. A recording of each talk will be available to the public afterward, pending speaker approval.
View CONES archives here
GO-SEA Project
with
Dr. Rebecca Helm and Ari Puentes
January 25, 2023
Rebecca Helm is a marine biologist studying life in the open ocean and at the ocean’s surface. Helm grew up in Arizona and completed her undergraduate degree in Marine Science at Eckerd College before conducting research on jellyfish life cycles as a Fullbright Fellow in South Africa. Helm received a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Brown University, where she was an NSF Graduate Student Research Fellow and an NSF EPSCoR fellow. Her Ph.D. work focused on the evolution of open-ocean and coastal jellyfish species. Helm then conducted research on circadian rhythms as a postdoc at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and later at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, where she continued her research on coastal and open-ocean jellies. For the last four years, Helm has been an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina Asheville, where she has led multiple interdisciplinary projects on the biology of life on the high seas. She is now an assistant professor at Georgetown University.
Ari Puentes is an undergraduate Biology student at UNC Asheville. He is interested in mycology and is working on a research project assessing the effects of prescribed fires on fungal communities. In addition to this project, he recently co-created the UNC Asheville Fungarium, the first fungarium in western North Carolina. He is an avid naturalist and community science enthusiast and has been the community outreach manager for GO-SEA since the start of the project.
Here is a link to the iNaturalist GO-SEA project.
Here is a link to the project's field guide.
Download the "How To Look For Surface Life" Document
Download the "Beach Combing Guide" Document
