Three Coastal Environmental Science Undergraduates Receive Spring 2020 LSU Discover Grants

On January 17, LSU Discover Undergraduate Research Program announced their Spring 2020 Research Grant recipients. This grant awards undergraduates at LSU with a minimum 3.0 GPA. Three of the 15 winners are undergraduates from LSU’s College of the Coast & Environment: Kendall Brome, Denise Poveda, and Callie Snow.

At LSU Discover Day, on April 28, they will present their research before a panel of LSU judges and compete for first place.

Kendall Brome, Undergraduate Senior, Coastal Environmental Science and Mathoutdoors, a woman smiles and holds up an LSU Discover T-shirt

  • Hometown: Gig Harbor, Washington
  • High School: Gig Harbor High
  • Anticipated Graduation: Fall 2020

Brome is working with LSU Geography & Anthropology Professor Kristine DeLong on a project involving paleoclimatic reconstructions in the Caribbean using fossilized corals as temperature proxies. These fossilized corals provide snapshots of what the climate was like in the Caribbean Sea during the past few hundred thousand years since the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago. DeLong collects the samples by coring the fossilized corals, which are no longer living. Like trees, corals have visible bands that demarcate their growth. Brome uses an inductively-coupled plasma optical emission spectrometer to analyze the chemistry of the fossilized corals with 12 samples from each of the annual bands and determine the temperature over of the course of that year.

 “It is important to understand how natural processes have adapted to global warming and cooling events over history because it allows us as humans to better conserve and protect the environment. I am passionate about this because the Earth is something all people from all places share, and I want to help keep it as sustainable as possible, which is what I hope to work on in my future career as a scientist,” Brome said.

Denise Poveda, Undergraduate Senior, Coastal Environmental Sciencea woman smiles with arms crossed in front of a black background

  • Hometown: Panama City, Panama
  • High School: Academia Interamericana de Panama
  • Anticipated Graduation: December 2020

This grant will fund a continuation of Poveda’s research from last semester in which she and a team of researchers at LSU’s Coastal Systems Ecology Lab are evaluating the plant productivity, decomposition rates and nitrogen and carbon levels in Louisiana’s Wax Lake Delta. Wax Lake Delta is a notable part of Louisiana’s coastal landscape because it is one of few areas where the land is building rather than eroding. Wax Lake Delta is a naturally growing delta that can serve as a proxy for engineered sediment diversions that are part of Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan. Specifically, Poveda is gathering data on how plant communities will respond to changes in inundation time to evaluate the impacts of artificial river sediment diversions on the ecology of the Mississippi River.

 

Callie Snow, Undergraduate Senior, Coastal Environmental Sciencea woman on a boat bends over to examine something

  • Hometown: Magnolia, MS
  • High School: Parklane Academy
  • Anticipated Graduation: May 2020

Snow is a two-time recipient of an LSU Discover research grant, having received one last fall to fund her research focusing on cyanobacteria harmful algal blooms, or CyanoHABs, that occurred in Lake Pontchartrain last summer. This year, Snow will use her new funds to continue her project.

For the upcoming spring semester, she will analyze the influence of certain environmental factors on the CyanoHABs’ toxicity and prevalence. In a controlled lab setting, she will introduce different environmental variables, such as certain nutrients (nitrogen) with different temperature adaptations, into isolated cultures of CyanoHAB species in varying measurements and combinations, mimicking the different seasons. This should allow her to distinguish which combinations of environmental factors are responsible for the blooms and toxin production in Lake Pontchartrain. The ability to isolate species directly from Lake Pontchartrain will set this project apart from others studies that have used distributed stock cultures not sourced directly from the lake.

 

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