Megan King slogs through ankle-deep water in one of the most foreboding habitats on the planet, a mangrove forest.
She uses a skinny white length of PVC pipe as a hiking stick, bracing with it while stepping over and stooping under mangrove roots and limbs.
It's a stinky, sloppy environment, but it's a second home for King, one of the top students at Florida Gulf Coast University in Southwest Florida.
"I'm taking measurements of the community structure, then also getting a leaf area index, which tells you how many layers of leaves are in the canopy," King, 21, says while stretching a metal yellow tape measure around the trunk of a small mangrove tree. "We're trying to create an allometric relationship to figure out how much biomass is in the system."
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