This page is of abstracts from selected published journal articles (see 'abbreviated vita') as scanned from the first page of the original publication.  See 'full vita' for a complete list of publications.  These publications are presented in chronological order.  Brief anecdotal comments precede each abstract.

This is a seminal paper on the forests of the Yucatan Peninsula that uses state of the art statistical techniques to illucidate vegetation patterns at the landscape scale.  The paper is also valuable for it's quantification/description of individual representative forests of the region.  The listing of woody species is not insignificant.  I hope to followup this effort with a second looking at patterns on a local scale.  It was published in the international 'Journal of Vegetation Science.'
 

While on sabbatical leave at the Instituto de Ecologia in Xalapa, Mexico I spent some time at the La Mancha field station on the Gulf of Mexico coast just north of Veracruz.   This paper resulted from a collaborative project that I was involved with while at the field station.  It describes the germination ecology of 5 species of plants growing on the local sand dunes.  My work was minor relative to the work by the many past and present researchers at La Mancha, although I learned a lot about sand dune ecology.  This paper appeared in the Canadian Journal of Botany.

Since my days at Tulane University, I have been involving undergraduate students in research projects.  Not only is this paper coauthored with one of those students, most of the field work for the paper involved student research on particular hardwood forests for several Honors in Biology projects.  The paper focuses on describing forests that are example remnants of a vegetation type around New Orleans.

1995

This paper, on the forests of the Yucatan, is the first to be published of several.  The paper is significant by it's quantitative description of the Peninsula's forest vegetation.  It's very much a floristic paper, too, in that tables of the dominant trees and shrubs are presented, indicative of the continuum of forest communities east-west across the northern Peninsula.  The paper also shows that forest species on two Mayan ruins are distinct from the surrounding forest community.
 

1993

The Mississippi River delta has been very little studied, partly because of accessibility and the unpredictability of weather affording safe travel.  This paper describes the colonization and early development of plant communities on new mudflats.  The mudflats form when the River drops sediment in sufficient quantity to keep ahead of natural subsidence processes.  Since the delta is an area of the State that has experienced huge wetland losses, any land formation and subsequent plant succession is noteworthy.  The newly developed mudflats support a very large migratory bird population during the winter and therefore this sort of study is of great interest to wildlife land managers.
 

1991

The Mississippi River delta wetlands support huge monospecific stands of the 'roseau' cane, Phragmites australis.  The cane dominates the peripheral lands of the delta and is most important as a buffer to powerful tropical storms that often strike the region during summer and fall.  This paper looks at the population genetics of the dominant clonal types of the cane, and proposes the likely series of events for establishment of the unique growth patterns to the clones observed in the delta.
 

1988

The Pearl River is the southern-most border between Mississippi and Louisiana.  This paper reports on the annual growth of herbaceous plants in the 3 dominant kinds of marshes in the basin - fresh marsh, intermediate salinity marsh, and brackish marsh.  More importantly, the paper describes the incredible annual variation that occurs in marsh production, a phenomena that has been described in marshes in other parts of the world.
 

1987

Old growth forests in the United States are incredibly rare due to human activity.  This paper is a descriptive study on such a forest located about an hour north of New Orleans.  It is a forest dominated by American beech and southern magnolia, with a dense shrub understory of star anise (an evolutionarily primitive flowering plant).  This forest type is known to have dominated small stream bottomlands throughout the Coastal Plain of the southeastern United States.
 

1985

The fruits of the genus Illicium are in the fossil record of the northeastern United States indicating that this genus of small shrubs is one of the most primitive flowering plants in North America.  Two species are still found living in the United States.  lIlicium parviflorum is found in relictual populations in the northern highlands of Florida, particularly around the clear springs in Ocala National Park.  This study documents the pollination process in this species significantly showing that small flies play a large roll.
 

1983

The Pearl River is the southern border between Louisiana and Mississippi.  This paper presents the results of my Ph.D. research.  Using the technique of 'ordination', the paper documents the continuum of vegetation change within the most southern region of the floodplain of the Pearl River.  The paper is the first of several descriptive community studies I have published.
The paper clearly shows that surface elevation (reflected in intensity of flooding) and salinity play a large role in the wetland landscapes of the basin.

The following paper looks at reproduction in the very primitive flowering plant, Illicium floridanum found growing in sandy soils along small streams near the Gulf Coast, from west to the Florida Parishes in Louisiana and east to the panhandle of Florida.  The study looks at pollination, flower and fruit development, as well as seed production.
 

1982

Spartina alterniflora is the dominant plant in the most saline marshes of coastal Louisiana.  Huge monospecific stands are common in this species from the Gulf coastal wetlands to the wetlands of New England.  Decomposition of the plant is an important process to the ecology of salt marshes because the rate of decomposition regulates much of what happens in this ecosystem dominated, not by herbivores, but by 'detritivores' (organisms feeding off dead tissue).  This paper looks at how fast Spartina decomposes by season.

1978

Louisiana has the most wetlands of any state, excluding Alaska!  This paper publishes the results of my Masters thesis which documented the production and decomposition of the most prevalent plants growing in the salt marshes along the coast of Louisiana.  It also hypothesized that the very high production of the marshes could be a result of the large influx of nutrients from the Mississippi River.