How will you use the data you collected at Mearns Rock and other locations in Prince William Sound?
Alan Mearns: As you may have noticed, the Mearns Rock photo series is only “the tip of the iceberg”; a small piece in a much larger puzzle. Mearns Rock was one of our study sites that was oiled but not cleaned. One purpose of the Mearns Rock photos is to see if we can use these landscape-scale photos to replace some of the very intensive and expensive quantitative biology methods (described above) at future oil spills. We have the photos and the data we collected for the past 10 years, but have not yet begun to compare them. Another purpose of conducting our annual trips to Prince William Sound was to train local citizens in hopes that they would continue long-term monitoring and photography once we were gone. Each year, we invited members of the Whittier Coast Guard Auxiliary to join us as we traveled around Knight Island. Often, two or more vessels operated by citizens and their families accompanied us. We took them ashore, showed them the photo sites, and dug pits to look for signs
