A belated congratulations to soon-to-be alumni/ae Tim Covino and Meredith Steele! Tim has accepted a position as an assistant professor in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability at Colorado State University. Meredith has accepted a position as an assistant professor in the Department of Crop and Soil Environmental Sciences at Virginia Tech. Both begin their new gigs in January 2014. Hooray!
A big welcome to Chelsea Clifford, the newest PhD student in the Heffernan lab. Chelsea is supported by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. She received her BA in Biology from Carleton College in 2010, and has worked for the MacAurther Agro-ecology Research Station and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Chelsea's interests are primarily in the ecology and biogeochemistry of designed, altered, and restored ecosystems.
New paper on hydrologic feedbacks in the Everglades has been published in PLoS One. In this study, we develop a mathematical model of interactions between peat accumulation, vegetation productivity, soil elevation, and water flow. We show that the resulting feedbacks can cause spontaneous divergence of ridges and sloughs, and that these feedbacks act differentially with direction. The model provides a range of predictions that we are hoping to test with data from our Everglades monitoring project. You can download the paper here.
In between collecting data and writing papers, we do have to eat. Happily, Durham is a great place to do that. There are lots of really creative and exciting restaurants ranging from the casual to the refined, many of them with a focus on updating southern cuisine. We have a great farmer's market, and many restaurants place a lot of emphasis on local sourcing of there food. A fleet of food trucks peddle everything from dumplings to pizza to raw foods. No wonder Durham was recently named Tastiest Town by Southern Living magazine!
Tim Covino, along with McGlynn Lab grad students Kendra Kaiser and Erin Seybold, organized a demonstration day at our field site in New Hope Creek. The New Hope Creek project involves continuous monitoring of water chemistry and other variables to understand processes going in the terrestrial watershed and within the stream itself. Tim, Kendra, and Erin, along with many other members of the River Center, took this opportunity to educate members of the community about the things we measure, how we measure them, and why. Kris Voss of the Bernhardt lab helped find and identify stream invertebrates. As you can see, the recent rains had NHC running pretty high and turbid. One of the things we are hopnig to understand at NHC is how these floods influence metabolic processes and nutrient cycling. Chelsea Clifford has accepted an offer to enter the PhD program at the Nicholas School as a member of the Heffernan lab. Chelsea is a graduate of Carleton College, has worked on Chesapeake Bay restoration and land use effects in central Florida, and is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Congratulations Chelsea, and welcome to Duke, the River Center, and the Heffernan Lab!
Our paper on ecohydrologic feedbacks and pattern formation has just been accepted for publication in PLoS One. This paper uses a simple quasi-spatial model to show that the need to route water through the Everglades landscape, in conjunction with local positive feedbacks on peat accretion, can produce directional feedbacks that generate flow-perpendicular pattern. The model also makes a number of predictions about relationships between water flow and microtopographic variation that we hope to test with our large-scale Everglades field sampling. Will post a link to the paper as soon as it is in press.
A cool set of underwater photographs of rivers from National Geographic. One of our study sites (Blue Hole Spring in the Ichetucknee River, FL) is included.
I will note that Blue Hole has fairly high nitrate concentrations, despite it's otherwise excellent condition. Which is an example of why we think that nitrate contamination may not be the whole story in Florida Springs. Anna Braswell, PhD student in the lab, has received a grant from the Garden Club of America to support her research on land use history and the structure and resilience of coastal wetlands. Way to go Anna!
Virtually everyone who submits papers for publication in peer reviewed journals will have some of those papers rejected. This is particularly true if you are submitting work to prominent journals, so developing a thick(er) skin is essential for a life in research. Early in my career, rejection was really hard to deal with. Since I didn't have a record or experience to fall back on, it felt as if any rejection was a step backwards professionally. Rejection of my work also stung personally. I worked hard on that! How can these reviewers and editors think I am not good enough?
As I have advanced in my career, it is easier to recognize rejection (or acceptance) of a specific paper as a judgement on that piece of work, rather than on me personally. A recent review request really brought this home to me. The editor who requested the review from me had recently handled a paper I submitted to the same journal, and ultimately rejected it. (After submitting to another journal, that paper is now in revision, and I hope and expect will be accepted there.) The paper I reviewed was on a related topic and had some interesting ideas, but ultimately had some substantial flaws and I recommended it not be accepted. In his letter to the authors, the editor referred to both reviewers as experts in the subject of the paper. So despite having recently rejected my work, this editor nonetheless sought out my opinion on a closely related paper. If his rejection of my paper had |
Welcome!This is the homepage of the Heffernan Lab at Duke University. Here you can find all sorts of information about our research, teaching, and outreach. If you have any questions, contact Dr. Heffernan. Dr. Jim HeffernanI am an Assistant Professor in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. My research is focused on the causes and consequences of major changes in ecosystem structure, mostly in streams and wetlands. Archives
May 2018
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