Publications

Herein we provide excerpts of the reviewers' comments and our response. We did not duplicate the portion of the reviewers' comments in which they summarized our findings.

No abstract available.

Coastal Louisiana wetlands contain about 37% of the estuarine herbaceous marshes in the conterminous United States. The long-term stability of coastal wetlands is often a function of a wetland's ability to maintain elevation equilibrium with mean sea level through processes such as primary production and sediment accretion. However, Louisiana has sustained more coastal wetland loss than...

The effectiveness of conservation efforts ultimately depends on the recognition that decision making, and the systems that it is designed to affect, are inherently dynamic and characterized by multiple sources of uncertainty. To cope with these challenges, conservation planners are increasingly turning to the tools of decision analysis, especially dynamic optimization methods. Here we...

Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) derived from MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite imagery and land/water assessments from Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery were used to quantify the extent and severity of damage and subsequent recovery after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita of 2005 within the vegetation communities of Louisiana's coastal wetlands...

An aim of community ecology is to understand the patterns of competing species assembly along environmental gradients. All species interact with their environments. However, theories of community assembly have seldom taken into account the effects of species that are able to engineer the environment. In this modeling study, we integrate the species' engineering trait together with...

The northern Gulf of Mexico coast of the United States has been identified as highly vulnerable to sea-level rise, based on a combination of physical and societal factors. Vulnerability of human populations and infrastructure to projected increases in sea level is a critical area of uncertainty for communities in the extremely low-lying and flat northern gulf coastal zone. A rapidly...

Forecasting marsh collapse in coastal Louisiana as a result of changes in sea-level rise, subsidence, and accretion deficits necessitates an understanding of thresholds beyond which inundation stress impedes marsh survival. The variability in thresholds at which different marsh types cease to occur (i.e., marsh collapse) is not well understood. We utilized remotely sensed imagery, field...

Executive Summary When considering climate change, risks to Native American lands, people, and cultures are noteworthy. Impacts on Native lands and communities are anticipated to be both early and severe due to their location in marginal environments. Because Native American societies are socially, culturally, and politically unique, conventional climate change adaptation planning and...

No abstract available.

Throughout the past century, emergent wetlands have been declining across the Gulf of Mexico. Emergent wetland ecosystems provide a variety of resources, including plant and wildlife habitat, commercial and recreational economic activity, and natural barriers against storms. As emergent wetland losses increase, so does the need for information on the causes and effects of this loss...

Alabama is over 132,000 km2 (51,000 miles2) in area, 483 km (300 miles) long, and 322 km (200 miles) wide (Copeland, 1968). Coastal Alabama comprises Mobile and Baldwin Counties and the surrounding State waters in the Gulf of Mexico (Figure 1; O’Neil and Mettee, 1982). It is part of both the East Gulf Coastal Plain section of the Coastal Plain province and the Mississippi-Alabama shelf...