The major
focus of our current work is in understanding how human activities on land
and the water alter conditions in coastal ecosystems, communities, and populations.
We have worked with a variety of organisms ranging from bacteria to
invertebrates, to fish, birds, and mammals. We also cross-cut taxonomic
categories by working in hydrology, hydrodynamics, biogoechemistry, as well
as more traditional
biological and ecological aspects of the land/sea coupling. Currently,
researchers and students in our lab are working on projects on the following
topics:
Relationships of land covers
on coastal watersheds to nitrogen exports to estuaries, nitrogen transformations
in estuaries, and their consequences for coastal organisms
Exploration of management
options to reduce or manage land-derived nitrogen loads to estuaries
Ecology of seagrass beds
Effects of nutrient loading on salt marsh plants
Internet-based tool to allow users to estimate land-derived N
loads, transformations, nitrogen concentrations in water, and export from
shallow estuaries
Stable isotopic approaces to deciphering estuarine food webs: who
is eating who, and to what extent are benthic envertebrates, fish, and pelagic
organisms coupled?
Marine food web interactions in Gulf of Maine biota (zooplankton and
cetacean baleen)
Research in these general areas involes a diversity of approaches and methods,
including field and lab experimentation, field sampling of water and sediments,
chemical analyses, stable isotopes, GIS, computer simulations, elemental
analysis, flow cytometry, and many other methods. We work with interns
to select well-defined, feasible projects from these general areas of reaserch,
and from related topics.
