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Working outside, studying the Longleaf Pine Forest in South Mississippi, graduate student
Knox Flowers has grown accustomed to extreme South Mississippi heat. Ecologists at USM
have spent most of their time at test sites like this one at the Lake Thoreau Environmental
Center in Hattiesburg. But the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill opened up a different eco-system
to research, and a new set of challenges. The proximity to the coast and the accessibility,
you know we really have a unique opportunity to study it. And while much research has been
done on water quality and animal life along the coast, Flowers led a team of researchers
to study the impact of the oil spill on plants in the Mississippi marshland. The marsh often
gets ignored in recovery process because the marsh is a tough place to do research in,
it's very muddy, it's very hot, it's laden with insects. And so people just sort of do
visual assessments of the marsh, and my concern was that no one was going to get in the marsh
and get muddy and put in the effort to actually see what the impacts were of these marshes.
Dr. Davis says the importance of this study is simple, the marsh plant life feeds the
coastal ecosystem, so studying the condition of the marsh will give scientists an idea
of how the overall food web is recovering from the oil spill. The marsh is kind of like
the energy cycle for the coast, so a lot of what you see down there is kind of controlled
by the marsh so when you impact the marsh you're really impacting all these systems.
Flowers says it's been tough to witness so much damage first-hand. You could visibly
see spots that have been oiled and died off, so you can visually see the damage and some
replenishment but a lot of the areas were still really impacted by it. So it was interesting
kind of seeing that, kind of disheartening at the same time. While Flowers has wrapped
up his first phase of studying plants at oil sites, he believes we've only scratched the
surface to understanding the full impact of the spill on the environment. From the University
of Southern Miss, I'm Layla Essary.