What follows is a brief description of my major research endeavors of the past.  Because of them, I believe one would label me a 'community ecologist'.

Tulane Days

I began my research career while a graduate student at Tulane University.   There I undertook two monumental and seminal studies on Louisiana wetlands.  The first was thesis research associated with my Masters degree and involved the first comprehensive study of the dominant wetland plants in the saline marshes of the State.  The work spun off from some contractual work in the marshes south of the fishing village of Delacroix located southeast of New Orleans.  The work was also the first to look at primary productivity and decomposition of the State's most prevalent marsh plants.  Immediately following that study, I had the opportunity to begin a landscape scale study of the plant communities in the southern portion of the Pearl River basin.   It became the research for my Doctor of Philosophy degree.  This phytosociological study was about the continuum of vegetation associations from the hardwood bottoms, through cypress-tupelo wetlands, into the fresh and saline marshes at and near the terminus of the basin.  A simple polar ordination was used as the tool to elucidate the community relationships.  Finally, my last years at Tulane were spent on two new projects, (1) quantifying woody plants of two regional forested areas, one in the northern Yucatan Peninsula, and the other here in southeastern Louisiana.  These data and studies are still under analysis, today.  (2) With my former thesis advisor (Leonard Thien), we looked at the pollination biology of the primitive, local angiosperm, Illicium floridanum and its relative, I. parviflorum, in northern Florida.
 
 

Early Loyola Days

Upon arrival at Loyola University in 1983, I immediately undertook a collaborative study on fishes of southern and western Mississippi with one of my former mentors (Royal D. Suttkus).  The project was a way to have undergraduate students participate in simple research projects.  Over the first several years, I made over 110 fish collections with the help of many students.  At this same time, I began research at the mouth of the Mississippi River on land owned and operated by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.  At first, the study simply was to document the development of plant communities on new mudflats to compare with mudflats created by humans after the manipulation of the hydrology.  The question of whether humans could duplicate the results of nature was an important one to the wildlife managers of the area.  Migratory birds depend upon the mudflats for their over winter food.

By the late 1980’s, I solicited the expertise of a plant geneticist in Biology (Don Hauber) to study the dominant wetland plant in the peripheral wetlands of the Mississippi River delta.  The tall cane, Phragmites australis, grows in huge stands like the one shown in the photo of an area just east of South Pass.  In the delta it clearly shows clonal patterns to growth that has turned out to be interesting from a genetic and invasive perspective.  The projects that we completed on Phragmites were of great value for their support of undergraduate research in Biology at Loyola University.
 
 

Other Sidelights in Research

There have a scattering of a couple of small research projects during my academic career.  Most were sidelights, but have contributed to my diverse career.  They include a study on road kill snakes (!) of the northern Yucatan, a chart on definitive characteristics of plant families, a floristic study of Jean Lafitte National Historical Park, germination requirements of Mexican sand-dune plants, and the description of an old-growth Beech-Magnolia coastal plain forest.  All have resulted in publications.
 
 

These two images of wetland scenes show the natural beauty that exists here in SE Louisiana.  It's so important to demystify this ecosystem type through research and education because so many people see wetlands as places to drain and develop.