Undergraduate Research
Bailey Price: Bailey is a junior at UA and is currently conducting a creel survey of bank fisherman on the Black Warrior River here in Tuscaloosa and outside of town. We are hoping to find out what species of fish people are catching and what people are eating in this study.
Bailey holding a "large" smallmouth buffalo in the lab captured from the
Pearl River, MS
Britton O'sheilds: Britton is a Junior at UA and helped me in Fall 2006 with field collections of mussels and tree cores on the Sipsey and Pearl Rivers. Britton is interested in algae and will be beginning work with Juan Lopez-Bautista examining algae dynamics in the also unregulated Cahaba River...cool!
Britton drags the canoe over a gravel shoal in the Sipsey River where we
collected bivalve mussels in fall, 2006. This is one of a handful of the most
beautiful and pristine shoals I have ever seen.
Byron Comeens: Byron is a junior at UA and is majoring in environmental science. Byron is researching long-term ecological interactions of bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) with natural hydrology on the unregulated Sipsey River. Because bald cypress are such a long-lived tree species (related to sequoia), extensive growth chronologies can be developed which extend back in time as far as 1000 years. These chronolgies may lend insight into the nature of cypress and southeastern American rivers long before humans impacted them. This data could eventually help in managing our riverine resources to best approximate historical riverflows.
Byron using an increment borer to sample the growth chronology of
a cypress tree in a lower Sipsey River floodplain lake.
Keke Pounds : Keke is a freshman biology major at University of Alabama and is assisting me this semester in collecting tree core samples from the Sipsey and Pearl Rivers. Keke is interested in an number of the organisms commonly encountered on the floodplain and is just observing patterns in nature right now and generating questions. One of the coolest things we've seen out there was this mound of live ants which apparently got washed into the river and was drifting (at a fast rate) through the dynamic floodplain.
.JPG)
A live mound of ants which Keke and I observed drifting through an
upper Sipsey River floodplain lake. It isinteresting to ponder how these
ants may use floods as aunique type of dispersal mechanism in
unregulated rivers.
Stephen Kone is a senior at UA who is interested in largemouth bass population dynamics. His project is examining the population dynamics of largemouth bass in the Sipsey River, an unregulated floodplain ecosystem. While much is already known on the population age structure of bass from reservoirs, glacial lakes and regulated rivers, Stephen's research is one of the 1st studies to document these data in an unregulated riverine floodplain ecosystem. This is important because, at one time before humans and dams, most river ecosystems in the Southeast probably functioned in a similar way to the Sipsey.
