Homer’s Kachemak Bay Campus Semester by the Bay students finish their spring 2026 semester with an evening poster session highlighting work focused on investigations of the local sea otter population. That event took place on April 28th and the students had a final symposium day on April 29th hosted by Dr. Debbie Tobin and Dr. Jackie Cason, participating with the Homer program from the University of Alaska Anchorage.
The spring cohort has 12 students and they began the symposium day by sharing projects they’ve been working on with local organizations over the semester. Here are a few excerpts from the project presentations:
“I decided to do an essay, kind of storytelling, story, because part of what I wanted to do was portray, I kind of purposely anthropomorphize them, because, rather than doing I think bringing emotion and connection can, like, make people want to be more interested, and then when they're more interested, they can actually listen to the science side and like, care about what they're doing. So I wanted people to care about bears and not think that they're big and scary and mean, and talk about some of the behaviors that we see similarly with this.”
“I watch as she sniffs the air. Knowing her sense of smell is over 1000 times greater than mine, I can only imagine how she sees the world. Does she smell and color? Could she tell me how far away the other mom and her cubs are are her maternal instincts kicking in as she gages the dangers around her through her nose. Or maybe me and her are both in harmony simply enjoying the sweet nectar smell of the springtime flowers.”
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“For my final project, I made a 10 minute video that I'm going to show in my internship presentation of a trip that I took across the bay of the Kasitsna lab and I helped a grad student with his macro algae research. And the videos, like, it's five minutes of just kind of the work we were doing and just the tour of the lab. Because, I feel like a lot of us have heard a lot about the Kasitsna Bay lab, but haven't been over there. This is just an introduction to it, if you want to call it that. This is trailer. We were basically just riding around the three islands, Yukon, Cohen and Heskett looking for kelp.”
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“I decided to do a poster on a climate change issue, and I wanted to focus on bird migration. I feel like people know climate change is happening, but they don't know much about the specifics, or how it's going to affect specific organisms. So, yeah, I made this poster that is based on Arctic birds, and I've included why this matters, and also included how this can affect ecological communities, because birds prey on insects, rodents, invertebrates. And then, I've included why this is happening. A lot of this is because of rising temperatures from greenhouse gas emissions. So, there's also a section on what we can do to reduce our emissions, such as walking, biking and eating more plant based food. I've also included at the bottom a little bit of the research that is going on with the National Park Service. They started tagging birds and putting geo locators on them to see how this warming might be affecting them and their movement.
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That was Arabella Levinsky, Colby Gribben and Grace Rubeling.
Levinsky has been a Homer resident for about 4 years and in the summer she is a guide with Tutka Bay Lodge in Kachemak Bay that offers bear viewing on the Katmai coast. Levinsky completed her semester project related to bears in the Cook Inlet region of Alaska.
Griffen, from the University of North Carolina in Willmington, shared a brief video that he created while interning with NOAA’s Kasitsna Bay Lab. It included details about the work he did there and a tour of the facility itself.
Grace Rubeling, with the University of Alaska Anchorage, created a final project presentation as a poster related to the effects of climate change on migratory birds. As she explained, “I’m really passionate about birds and that’s what led me here.”
Other presentations for the semester projects portion of the day long event included: a flyer and presentation on ecotourism from Emma Price, a short book made with art from students at the Wynn Nature Center from Molly Walters and Olivia Coleman, composition of stories for stories presented during KBBI’s Kachemak Bay Currents from Gina Barbosa, a map showing wetlands by the Homer Airport and Kachemak Drive with a description of how wetlands absorb water rather than repelling it like pavement construction would and others.
Additional student oral presentations continued through Wednesday afternoon at the Kachemak Bay Campus. The spring 2026 cohort finished their semester on April 30th. Some students will stay in Homer through the summer with various employment opportunities and some will return home shortly.
Students interested in the fall semester or future cohorts can find more information at www.semesterbythebay.org.
Reporting from Homer, this is Emilie Springer.
