A Semester in Review

This week started our Fall semester at USM and with it, our start of semester lab meeting, where each member spoke about their plans for the upcoming semester. We welcomed in a new graduate student and said a soft goodbye to our outgoing student, although he will still be with us for some time, just not as a student. Therefore, this week, I thought I'd write about my semester goals and give everyone an overview of what I'm working on and the projects I'm planning to complete this fall.

I am currently working on three projects at the lab, and I expect to finish at least two of the three this fall. My oyster mortality project, where I'm working to understand how freshwater inflow from repeated Bonnet Carré Spillway operations has affected the health of oysters in the Mississippi Sound, is in a good place. I mentioned that I will present this work at the November CERF conference in Virginia, and today I made a good step toward that goal. My hope and current plan is to have a manuscript ready to submit by the end of December based on this work, and this will mark the first manuscript of my postdoc, first work on organisms larger than nematodes, and I will likely submit this work to a journal I have not published in previously. Additionally, we are working to wrap up our project modeling how Bonnet Carre Spillway operations affect the survivorship of oysters in the Mississippi Sound. Does this project sound eerily similar to my own independent research? Definitely. The key difference, though, is that for my work I am using fisheries independent monitoring data and calculating survivorship metrics, while the ecosystem modeling work consists of us building an entire ecosystem model, that we give monthly environmental data and yearly biomass data to train the model and then use the Bonnet Carré Spillway operations and associated environmental variables to investigate how oyster survivorship would change. More simply: my work isolates the oysters and the environment while the larger project uses all available information about the ecosystem to predict oyster health. We plan to finish this work and submit a report on the outcomes of this project by the end of the fall semester.

The third project is another modeling project, but this one focuses on the Mid-Breton Sediment Diversion or MBSD, which is a diversion of the Mississippi River meant to help restore coastal land by transporting freshwater and the sediment therein to nearby Louisiana basins. Changes to the Mississippi River that affect freshwater discharge--and especially those that increase suspended sediments--in the Mississippi Sound and Bight may have adverse effects on the fish and shellfish, so our team will be modeling the ecological impacts of the diversion. You can read more about the diversion using the link here. 

Besides these large projects and updates, I will be continuing my work with the MissDelta Workforce Development Initiative to support the recruitment of local students to the coastal and marine science workforce and I will be working on some other small projects, with updates to come in the next months. So stay tuned for another great year of blogs, marine science research, and everything coastal Mississippi.