Spring Beach Surveying with Cunningham Middle School Students  

by Melanie Gingras    

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Map showing monitoring sites for CMS students (Source: Melinda Martinez).

On May 17, 2016, CMGL MS students Melanie Gingras and Rachel Edwards returned to Bob Hall Pier in Corpus Christi to assist with the Texas High School Coastal Monitoring Program. CMGL has partnered with Tiffany Caudle of the Bureau of Economic Geology (BEG), a research unit of the University of Texas at Austin, since 2007. The purpose of this program is to engage young students, like the students from Cunningham Middle School, in coastal and marine sciences as well as to teach the students fundamental techniques for collecting beach profiles, wind, wave, current, and GPS data. This program is sponsored by the Texas General Land Office (GLO) and the data collected by the students at the two study sites is used to enhance the work done by the Texas Coastal Management Project.

The two study sites depicted here (above) are the sites monitored by Cunningham Middle School students. The beach-dune complex site has been monitored since 2009 and shows students the morphology of a natural beach, whereas the seawall site, which was added in 2015, depicts the morphology of a beach that is highly influenced by man-made structures.  

As students from Cunningham Middle School assemble, Tiffany Caudle review
the concepts and activities to be implemented during the study
(Photo credit: Melanie Gingras).

When the students arrived at Bob Hall Pier, they were debriefed by Tiffany Caudle regarding the purpose and importance of the project (right, Tiffany is speaking with her arm raised). At the first study site, the students were split into two groups. One group of students walked with a handheld GPS along the vegetation line and wet/dry line and measured winds, waves, and currents, while the other group performed a shore-normal beach profile. At the second site, the groups switched so that the group that performed the dune profile at the first site gathered the wind, wave, current, and GPS data at the second site while the group that gathered wind, wave, current, and GPS data at the first site performed the dune profile at the second site.

A group of students works with Tiffany to gather dune
elevation data (Photo credit: Melanie Gingras).

The group that performed the shore-normal beach profile (left), staked the transect using the permanent datum as a reference and used Emery rods, metric tape, and a hand level to survey the changes in elevation from the foredunes to the waterline.

The group that gathered wind, wave, and current data (below) did so with a Suunto compass, a pressure anemometer, a stopwatch, oranges, and measuring tape before breaking into smaller groups to walk the vegetation and wet/dry line with a differential GPS unit.

For more information about the Texas High School Coastal Monitoring program, click here.

A student from CMS launces an orange into the ocean while Rachel Edwards keeps time for the current measurement (left). A CMS student and Melanie Gingras measure the longshore distance traveled by an orange (right). (Photo credits: Melanie Gingraas and Rachel Edwards).