How did you end up in the field you are in today? Who or what inspired you to pursue this career?
I am from England originally. I have lived in the US since 1986 – I came here after I finished college to find a job. In fact I moved to the US specifically to study Louisiana wetlands. But I wasn’t always interested in marshes. When I was in grade school, geography was one of my favorite subjects. I really liked understanding how landscapes work, how they are formed, why they look like they do. Why are there hills in some places, rivers of different sizes, rocky coasts in one area and huge marshes in others? So I studied geography in college. It’s a slightly different subject in college in Great Britain compared to how it is taught in many US colleges. To begin with I was fascinated by ice sheets and glaciers. I really wanted to go to Antarctica. While I was in college, in Cambridge in eastern England where the land is flat as a pancake, I did a project on a glacier in the mountains of British Columbia in Canada. I made measurements of how the meltwater flowed through the glacier. Towards the end of my bachelors degree, I decided I wanted to carry on in college and do research. At the time I probably couldn’t think of any other career that would allow me to be outside and work on how the world is shaped. When I started looking at research opportunities I realized that in the 3 years I would have to do my PhD (that’s the way it is the British system – or at least it was then in the early 1980’s) if I was working on a glacier I would hardly be able to see it move. And I had realized by then that I wanted to make measurements of processes that I could see working in the landscape. So that’s how I started working in coastal marshes. The tide comes in and out at least once a day so there’s always something going on! And there is something to measure. I did my PhD research on how sediments are moved by the tide to build up coastal marshes. I worked in south-east England about 50 miles east of London. After I finally finished that study (and found that it wasn’t the everyday tides that are important in building up marsh sediments, rather its is the occasional really big tide) I was looking for more opportunities and found one in Louisiana. I’ve been here ever since!
What research projects are you currently involved in? How does math factor into your work?
Most of the projects I work on Louisiana involve looking at the processes (things like sediment deposition and plant growth) that keep Louisiana marshes alive! Louisiana marshes are deteriorating very rapidly and huge areas are turning from wetland to open water. Now once a marsh has gone, it is very difficult to tell exactly what the cause was (like doing an autopsy without the body – might not be an appropriate middle school analogy?). One of the main problems our marshes are having is ‘keeping their heads above the water’. In some areas the land is sinking very rapidly due to subsidence, and in other places the way the water flows through the marsh has been changed, e.g., by roads and spoil banks, so that water ponds up where it should flow in and out with the tide. Scientists believe that this can produce waterlogging of the marsh soil which causes chemical changes in the soil that kill the plants. Sometimes we say it’s a bit like overwatering a houseplant. It needs water to survive but too much is a bad thing. What intrigues me is why some marsh are still there when many others are gone.
With all these measurements, math is pretty important to my job. Simple geometry and arithmetic are important to compare measurements made with different techniques, and statistics are really useful in helping us find out where the real patterns are in all our data, over the background ‘noise’. I also have to be able to explain all my data to others. As I can put out thousands of those filer paper sediment traps during the course of a study, I use math to condense the data, and graphs to make it easier for people to see the changes over time or the differences between study sites.
What do you like best about your job? What do you like the least? What are the most common misconceptions people have about what you do?
The thing I like best about my job is figuring out how things work. I also like being outside in the marsh. Being in a boat on the water on the way to a study site when at sunrise is just great. I don’t spend as much time in the marsh as I used to but I always love it when I do go. Now I spend a lot of time figuring out what my research means, how it contributes to our understanding of the coast, and how it can help with restoration. The least favorite part of my job has to be paperwork. Most people would not believe the amount of forms and bureaucracy it takes to make a study happen. I don’t mind meetings (a lot of people hate them) but I do like interacting with people – there’s not much interaction with a piece of paper! The thing most people get wrong about my job is that because I’m a university professor they think all I do is teach class. I teach classes during semester – but I’m not on vacation the rest of the time! I spend the rest of the time generating ideas, solving problems, or trying to apply what we know to restore the coast. That’s what we hope students will do when they graduate – so it’s important that professors keep their skills sharp.
What’s the favorite place you have been so far? What was the strangest or most incredible thing that happened while conducting your work?
Perhaps my favorite place is a barrier island in north Norfolk in eastern England called Scolt Head Island. You can walk to the island at low tide and there is a small hut in the dunes where I have stayed while working there with other researchers. You carry on all your food, collect driftwood for the fireplace, and there is no electricity or running water. At the same time, from the hut high in the dunes you can see a wonderful salt marsh that is full of marsh pinks or purple sea lavender depending on the time of year. At high tide the marsh is gone – covered by several feet of water, enough to submerge all the vegetation. Perhaps the reason I like it so much is that I’ve spend some really fun times there – working hard on the marsh, setting up equipment, standing out there as the water rose over my boots, and then relaxing by the fire with all the good food we sweated to carry over in backpacks. Places are special usually because of the experiences you associate with them. This isn’t the most spectacular place I have been, but its still my favorite.
I’ve lots of stories to tell about my work – mostly about equipment that failed, studies that didn’t go as planned, or slogging through the endless mud! Quite recently I had quite a daunting experience out in a marsh in Louisiana. We were out in an airboat trying to relocate some stations that were put in about 10 years ago. The map we had wasn’t very good and there was lots of searching, and the weather turned bad. Thunderstorms are quite common in Louisiana in the summer. There we were, 3 of us, in an airboat (made of metal and high off the ground) in a flat marsh in a thunderstorm. It was too far back to the dock so we got out of the boat and just stood on the marsh in torrential rain with lightning all around us. There’s no where to sit down in a marsh! I was never really scared, more fascinated by the light show all around us. Then there was CLAP very close to us and my colleagues jumped so high! They were really nervous and I though it was quite funny. They couldn’t understand why I laughed -- what else was there to do?
What was your favorite subject when you were in middle school? What did you think you were going to be when you grew up? What advice do you wish someone would have given to you at the time?
I liked Math and Physics and Geography. I think mainly because of the teachers -- although I do recall having good English teachers too. Even though I liked reading literature I found it difficult to be analytical about it (and I still do). I had some great geography teachers. I remember when I thought I would be a Math and Physics teacher. This went on for several years until a geography teacher suggested I do geography and I remember thinking ‘what a good idea!’. I think one reason I saw myself as a teacher was because I had very little exposure to other careers. I was the first in my family to go to college, and apart from shop keepers and manufacturing workers I didn’t really encounter many other real-life jobs. I feel very pleased with how my career path has gone and there isn’t any advice I wish I’d had (as it all worked out well).
Why do you think it is important that students learn about wetlands in general? About Louisiana’s wetlands? What can we learn from studying this region?
Wetlands are really important ecosystems and occur in many places – not just at the coast. Wherever there’s water, there’s likely to be some kind of wetland, and the wetland perform many important functions that we depend on. They aren’t just smelly, stinky wastelands (as we used to think 150 years ago). As water flows through wetlands, many contaminants and pollutants can be removed, many, many species of wildlife and some of our really precious, very specialized plants live there too. But mainly I think its important to learn about them because they are so fragile and because they are disappearing at an alarming rate. Throughout the country wetlands are being built on or drained for agriculture. Once we put a subdivision on top of a wetland it is pretty much lost forever. People are making very serious changes to our landscape and, just as we understand how the landscape formed originally, we need to understand the implications of these changes. Louisiana is like a poser child for the nation’s wetland loss. The coast is naturally very dynamic but things people have done, for the most part unintentionally, have seriously altered the wetlands here and put them in a downward spiral. Students can learn about the problems here and see what happens when we don’t pay attention to the unintended consequences of our actions. Students can also look at Louisiana and learn a lot about how wetlands work – what makes some survive and others die – and apply those lessons to even small wetlands close to home.
What advice would you give to students who are interested in studying science? What are some of the diverse careers associated with the work you do?
Science isn’t all about test tubes and white lab coats – or even computers. There’s still a lot of science that needs to be done out there in the field. There are lots of things we still don’t know about our environment and lots of opportunities to make a difference. Make sure you study all parts of science. What I do may look like biology with plants and roots, but physics is really important to telling us how the water flows through the bayous and the soils, chemistry tells us how the plant survives (or doesn’t). It is important to have a little bit of everything to do environmental science well – don’t specialize too early.
Any final thoughts, words of advice, personal philosophy?
I hope students can see that doing science is fun. Part of that is enjoying the people you meet, and putting your interests with theirs to solve bigger problems than you could on your own. You have to be able to laugh about getting stuck in the mud when you work in wetlands, then pull yourself out or ask for help, and keep on going – it’s a good lesson for life.