#5 State of Your Research Prospectus (freewrite, 10 minutes)

Write about where you are with your thinking--for this freewrite focus on the intellectual content of your research project--not the logistics of getting the project done. How far as your thinking come from topic to question to problem to research in the library as you develop your review of the literature?

At first I was interested in doing deep sea vent colonies, but there is not much literature support to include in the literature review, so I decided to work on Chesapeake bay declining water quality. There has been a lot of research conducted on this topic and still the water quality isn’t where we want it to me. There is some improvemen tin certain areas, but other areas have not seen improvement at all. After researching and reading different papers, I have concluded that the big factor in declining water quality is the hypoxic water conditions hypoxic means that the oxygen levels are low. However, the problem is very complex there are a variety of reasons for declining water qualities and all of them are intertwined to each other. You can’t talk about one factor without running into another one. All of the papers I have read so far deal with different threats to the bay, but it is interesting to see that they are all related and connected. I think there is some kind of cascade effect where one problem worsens another problem which worsense another one. I am doing ok with the literature review but I am uncertain about the project design later. I am not sure right now what needs to be done for the experimental design. Its clear that here is a major problem with the Chesapeake bay waters, but how to fix that? I am not sure.