What Comes Next

This week at the lab, we continued writing our Tipping Points project report, and I spent most of my time reworking figures, editing materials, and helping contextualize aspects of the work we started when I got hired. However, since nearly all of my week focused on these tasks, I thought I would spend this week's blog explaining the upcoming two months, as Kim and I will be finishing old projects, starting new projects, and supporting outreach activities.

October: In October, we will be transitioning from our Tipping Points project to spatio-temporal modeling to evaluate how Bonnet Carré Spillway operations affect the health of fish, shellfish, and fisheries in the Mississippi Sound and Bight. This is an expansion of some aspects of the Tipping Points project, but we are adding in the entire model domain, evaluating results across all model groups, and incorporating some additional scenarios. We are waiting on a few assets for this project, but we will get started shortly, as Kim will present this work at the upcoming CERF 2025 in early November. I will be finishing my oyster mortality project within the next few weeks and I have started building my presentation for CERF 2025. Additionally, in the first few weeks of October, I will be speaking with multiple school groups for Skype A Scientist and supporting a MissDelta undergraduate workforce development initiative in southern Louisiana. Then the week after, Kim and I will be welcoming families and community members at the GCRL Community Day.

November: In early November, Kim and I will present our research at CERF 2025 along with many other members of our USM family. After the conference, we will likely have the information necessary to start the spatio-temporal model runs for the MissDelta project. These model runs will be based on potential Mississippi River management scenarios and how the evolution of the Mississippi River and Delta will affect the fish, shellfish, and fisheries of the Mississippi Sound and Bight. I will also spend a lot of November writing, as I hope to have my oyster mortality work ready for submission by the end of December and another planned manuscript ready by May. This second manuscript will be the focus of a later blog, because I think the journal's request for manuscripts highlights an important gap in scientific publications. 

Stay tuned for more updates about our work here in southern Mississippi.