We Bring Mississippi to Louisiana

This week, Kim and I traveled to Baton Rouge, Louisiana for our MissDelta annual meeting. Every year, the researchers on the MissDelta project gather to discuss our progress, make decisions on how to move forward, and hear from partners and our funding agency on important updates and considerations for the future of the project. This year, the annual meeting was hosted at LSU and I had a great time reconnecting with collaborators, talking about the work we have been doing at USM and sharing some WDI efforts that I've led with ways that we can strengthen our coastal and estuarine workforce. 

One item that I really appreciated was our team effort to identify submission and task deadlines for the coming year. In November we are starting year four of this five year project and we discussed at length the importance of having enough time at the end of the project to create meaningful stories of the work we've done over five years and how the future of the Mississippi River and the delta will affect the ecosystem, the community, and the economy over the next 100 years. 

We have a lot of tasks to do over the next year, but I am confident in the plan we established at this annual meeting, and our colleagues seemed quite agreeable to a lot of the decisions we came to during our two day meeting. Our hope is to present some of the initial results from various project components at the State of the Coast meeting this May in New Orleans. For Kim and I, that means wrapping up one more set of water quality sampling and making some adjustments to the ecosystem model, which will help align our efforts with our colleagues'. 

Stay tuned for more updates from the lab.

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