My New Projects

Last week, I alluded to the fact that I will be working on [at least] two projects during my 3-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Southern Mississippi. This week, I thought I would talk about what those projects are, my involvement, and my goals in working with these teams.

The first project that I am working on is part of a consortium of researchers through Mississippi State University and USM to develop an alternative to the Bonnet Carré Spillway. The spillway is an engineered solution to the flooding that can occur from the Mississippi River. When there are excess freshwater inputs to the river, through storm activity or increased snow melt, freshwater is diverted from the Mississippi River into Lake Pontchartrain (SE Louisiana) and the Mississippi Sound Estuary. This diversion prevents the city of New Orleans from flooding, but pushes massive amounts of freshwater to the Gulf of Mexico, where Lake Pontchartrain empties. In 2019, engineers had to open the spillway twice because of likely flood conditions, engineers have opened the spillway more times in the past 14 years than the previous 60 years. While these openings are beneficial for residents of New Orleans, the current spillway opening protocols do not account for how the freshwater inputs into the Mississippi Sound Estuary affect the ecology of the system. Our team is looking to evaluate how freshwater inputs affect the ecology and hydrodynamics (water flow, salinity, nutrient loading, etc.) of this system and to evaluate if there are alternative strategies regarding the spillway that may be less disruptive to local Mississippi ecosystems.

The second project that I am working on is even larger, with a consortium of researchers across multiple southern states. The team on this project seeks to evaluate how changes in the Mississippi River Delta affect the ecology, hydrodynamics, and landscape ecology of the delta, how changes affect the socioeconomic climate of the residents and workers in the area that rely on the delta, and how we can broaden the diversity of scholars working on coastal-deltaic issues in the Gulf of Mexico. This project is the longer of the two projects I'm working on, and I officially start my subsection of this project in November, where I will be working on and assisting with the development of an ecological model describing major marine species in the area that are affected by changes to the delta. Without getting too far into the project details and without explaining how all of this research works (but stay tuned because I will start next week with the basics), I will be using mathematic equations to describe how animals respond to certain conditions, and then use data and model outputs from another team to see how the animals respond (again, more to come on this with more detail, I promise).

I'm so happy to have found such exciting work on which to start the next phase of my career. I hope you'll stick around for the weekly blogs to learn about what animals we are using in the model, how biology and mathematics come together to make food web models, what a trapezoidal response curve looks like, and so much more.