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.
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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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