TeamSeagrass Training Level 2 (16 Jun 2013)

It's the last day of Seagrass-Watch training for a smaller group of TeamSeagrass! Today, we are going indepth for Level 2 training!

Here's our only group photo because we forgot to take one for all the other events!


As always, Rudi in the background making sure everything is going well while Len leads the lectures.

We begin by working hard to make sure we get all our seagrass IDs right. As well as try our hand at seagrass pressing.

Each one of us has to explain seagrass ID to Len's satisfaction.

As we were doing seagrass pressing, some briskwalkers dropped by to see what we were up too. Yifeng and Johnson explained more about seagrasses and TeamSeagrass in dialect. Bravo!

We took the opportunity to give the briskwalkers some seagrass bookmarks! They are very pleased indeed.

Wah, Pei Yan's pressed specimen turns out very nice!

Valerie takes a photo of her pressed specimen before handing it up.

We closely scrutinised datasheets and photos to point out errors and omissions. Thus realising the importance of doing our own datasheets correctly.

We also had a go at data entry of our field monitoring yesterday. It was nice to see the statistics in the whole series of past monitoring.

Pei Yan is a maths teacher, so Valerie and I defer to her excel spreadsheet skills in generating awesome charts of the data.

All too soon the training session is at an end. As usual, the top scorer gets a prize and it is Neo Mei Lin, aka Giant Clam Girl. Bravo!

Second runner up is Jonathan Tan, young only in age as he is among our more experienced Team members.

And third is Valerie Phang, who is doing seagrass work on Chek Jawa!

We are grateful that Len and Rudi spent time to teach us and help us improve our monitoring. As a token of appreciation, Nor Aishah presented them with a copy of Dr Chua Ee Kiam's latest book "Wetlands in a City". This is so appropriate as Dr Chua also presented a book during TeamSeagrass' public launch six years ago.

TeamSeagrass events would not be possible without lots of work behind the scenes. There's always a lot of washing and other admin duties.

Rachel worked hard on the programme right until the last minute when she had to leave today for an overseas conference. Meanwhile, Nor Aishah, Wei Ling, Pearlynn and Melissa continue to make sure all goes well. Only having breakfast after all is set up.

Here's Pearlynn and Melissa once again, guarding the food from vagrant wildlife such as birds. Thank you ladies!

Thank you once again to Dr Len McKenzie and Rudi Yoshida of Seagrass-Watch for conducting the training. And to the Team members and guests for making time to attend the sessions. Hopefully, this will mean we can do more to cherish and protect our seagrass meadows!