Summer 2018: A time for fieldwork
Summer on the South Coast is hot and humid, but the free time afforded by University schedules makes summer an ideal time to complete time-sensitive fieldwork. This year some of my "summer" fieldwork began in April when weather was more conducive, but in total, I had a number of field weeks for April thru July.
April fieldwork began in the LaBranche wetlands just west of the New Orleans metropolitan area. These wetlands have received decades of increased salinity from Lake Pontchartrain to their north. The first picture below depicts the cypress swamp where trees show distinct signs of stress (few leaf branches, stubby growth, dead snags, etc.) and saltwater marsh species are moving in (e.g., Spartina patens). These marshes would likely have been affected by past Mississippi River floods from the south, and anthropogenic factors such as the construction of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (east of New Orleans) and the Bonnet Carre Spillway on their western edge. I'll be analyzing these tree rings soon to see if they might show evidence of these events.
In May 2018, I accompanied a team of 8 scientists to do some work on the coast of Alabama at Gulf State Park. On the beach side of Gulf State Park, huge resorts line the highway to begin the long stretch of Gulf Coast Spring Break destinations. Just north of those resorts are a series of brackish ponds (we worked on Middle Lake for the most part this summer; picture 2) that have received overwash deposits from the beach during past hurricanes. Dr. Kam-biu Liu pioneered the science of paleotempestology here nearly 30 years ago with sediment cores. Now he is bringing his students (Marianne Dietz and Johnny Ryu) and other colleagues (from the British Isles!) here to apply the latest science to Lake Shelby. While I was there coring trees, some of the group were collecting new sediment cores, others were using sub-bottom profilers to map the geological history of the lake, and still others were taking cores of the lake sediments to process for nutrient and toxin analysis. This work was largely unfunded and a product of knowing the right people at the right time. It was probably the most diverse fieldwork I have ever done with the most diverse workforce I have been with, and the results of that 3-day excursion should be interesting so stay tuned!
Finally, in July, I was able to help some colleagues with unrelated fieldwork. Ashley Booth is a PhD student and Scott Graham is a Masters student in the School of renewable Natural Resources at LSU. They are working on a project to determine the effects of vegetation on marsh elevation changes. I've accompanied them a few times to J. D. Murphree Wildlife Management Area in Port Arthur, Texas. One component of this research is something called a SET (sedimentation-erosion table) that measure changes in the height of the ground surface. In picture 3, you can see Scott assisting Ashley to measure the surface with the SET. They are in a thick mass of a plant called "roseau cane". Though this fieldwork can be ought at times, this crucial data is often overlooked by scientists, but could prove very beneficial in future sea-level rise conditions.
