Hallie Fischman has several projects monitoring the resilience of salt marshes and sand dunes to natural and human impacts. She works with a team of researchers at the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve (GTM NERR) as part of a NERR Science Collaborative project to monitor water quality in the Guana River and determine the role that mussels and oysters play in improving water quality in this estuary.
To meet these goals, she is mapping the spatial coverage of bivalves along the Guana River. She is also measuring heavy metal levels in the sediments, bivalve tissue, and water of the Guana River and building a state-wide dataset of metal levels to compare metal levels within the region, state, and over time. This project will initially focus on copper, which is known to be elevated in the Guana River, and will subsequently expand to include other heavy metals. The GTM Reserve also supports high levels of invasive hogs, and she is quantifying the marsh damage caused by hog’s trampling of grasses and predation of mussels. In addition to her salt marsh research, she is looking at interspecific facilitation between two sand dune grasses (Uniola paniculata, sea oats, and Panicum amarum, bitter panicgrass) and potential ways to utilize facilitation in sand dune restoration. Sand dune restorations in Florida primarily plant sea oats and ignore potential facilitation between grass species. She has planted grasses at seven beaches in Northeast Florida to test new restoration methods. Lab members engaged in the work: Hallie Fischman, Sydney Williams, Christine Angelini.
Collaborators: Ashely Smyth (UF), AJ Reisinger (UF), Shirley Baker (UF), Peter Ifju (UF), Nikki Dix (GTM NERR), Dail Laughinghouse (UF). Publications/Presentations: Fischman HS, Crotty SM, Angelini C. (2019). Optimizing Coastal Dune Restoration with the Stress Gradient Hypothesis. Proc. R. Soc. B 286: 20191978. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.1978 Gerrity S, Alestra T, Fischman HS, Schiel DR. (2020). Earthquake Effects on Abalone Habitats and Populations in Southern New Zealand. Marine Ecology Progress Series 656:153- 161. https://doi.org/10.3354/meps13458 Orchard S, Falconer T, Fischman HS, Schiel DR. (2020). Beach Dynamics and Recreation Access Changes on an Earthquake-Uplifted Coast. ISBN: 978-0-473-54392-1 https://hdl.handle.net/10092/101043 Crotty SM, Altieri AH, Bruno JF, Fischman H, Bertness MD. (2019). The Foundation for Building the Conservation Capacity of Community Ecology. Front. Mar. Sci. 6:283. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2019.00238 |