Perspectives on a 30-Year Career of Salt Marsh Research

Abstract

A hallmark of my career has been the development of a model of the responses of salt marsh vascular plants to changes in sea level. This discovery would not have been possible without long-term support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) and Long-Term Research in Environmental Biology (LTREB) programs. The LTER and LTREB programs have provided platforms for student research that would have been difficult or impossible to duplicate. Most of my students have benefited from the background of data, which stimulate a never-ending source of thesis topics and from the logistical support. My communication skills have been improved by LTER-sponsored workshops with journalists. I also have had an opportunity to share my enthusiasm for fieldwork with primary school students and teachers. Many of my numerous collaborations are consequences of novel, long-term data that emerged from research supported by the LTER and LTREB programs. There are important environmental trends that develop slowly in response to climate or that reveal themselves infrequently, such as disturbance responses, thresholds, and tipping points. These require long-term, place-based observation of the kind that the LTER and LTREB programs are designed to facilitate. My history with the LTER program began in the late 1970s. As a Yale graduate student working at The Ecosystems Center, Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) at Woods Hole, I participated in a workshop organized by Dan Botkin to develop a rationale for a longterm ecological monitoring program (Botkin 1978). After a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship, I moved in 1981 to the University of South Carolina (USC), which had sponsored one of the first LTER sites, North Inlet (NIN). North Inlet was the perfect place for starting a research program in salt marsh ecology, and my research there eventually was supported by the NSF LTREB program. I owe a great deal to NSF for that. My early career benefited enormously from infrastructure at USC’s field laboratory and support by the NIN LTER program, which I did not fully appreciate at the time.