Erosion along the coast forces individual plants to migrate landward, but ecological processes at the community level can mediate this migration response by altering the geomorphic environment.  I am particularly interested in how mechanisms of facilitation, competition, and engineering affect the spatial migration.

Sea level rise is typically a long-term process, but it affects large areas of land.  Research at my lab has investigated how sea level rise and plant community processes interact in dune systems.  Using cellular automata models, we have shown that when rates of sea level rise are fast enough, successional processes will break down and late successional species will be lost from the ecosystem.  This migration is of a generally linear movement towards the upland, but different plant functional groups move at different rates.

In marshes, sea level rise often drowns the center of the marsh first, due to an accretionary deficit.  With the advent of LIDAR laser altimetry data, modeling of salt marsh loss is possible at resolutions of 1 x 1 m horizontal and 1 cm vertical (with a mean error of 5-10 cm).  In this Geographic Information Systems (GIS) -based work, we have seen that some plant habitat zones are compressed, while others expand leading to differential amounts of habitat loss, depending upon the elevation-dependent requirements of each habitat zone.

 Moreover, the ecosystem services and importance values for wildlife are quite different depending upon each salt marsh habitat zone.  Collaborative work with colleagues at the State Key Laboratory in China has emphasized valuation methods and the cost of losing urban wetlands around Shanghai, China.

My lab’s research has also shown that hurricanes alter the spatial patterning of sediment deposition and subsequent marsh formation in barrier island systems.  Work on this subject has focused upon Hurricane Katrina overwash fans on Dauphin Island, Alabama.  My work with the Barrier Island Consortium, an NSF-sponsored group of researchers, has investigated the impact of coastal development upon vegetation and barrier island movement as well.