Two Assistantships Awarded to CC&E Faculty by CPRA

Two faculty in the LSU College of the Coast & Environment’s Department of Oceanography & Coastal Sciences have been awarded a 2020 Coastal Science Assistantship funded by the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority of Louisiana (CPRA). Giulio Mariotti and Tracy Quirk received two of the four assistantships, which are awarded annually. Additionally, CPRA awarded a third LSU faculty member, Carol Wilson, in the Department of Geology & Geophysics.

The Coastal Science Assistantship Program (CSAP), managed by Louisiana Sea Grant, enables faculty members from Louisiana institutions to fund full-time master’s students who are involved in research relevant to Louisiana’s coastal protection and restoration for a three-year period of study. This includes an internship at CPRA in which they will gain hands on experience while working with a state agency.

Mariotti’s research focuses on the effect of artificial river diversions on mud settling velocity in Barataria Bay. Mud settling velocity is a crucial, yet neglected, parameter for marsh evolution. LSU Coastal Environmental Science undergraduate student Michael McDonell (New Orleans, Louisiana) will return to LSU as a graduate student in the fall to work with Mariotti and study how salinity affects the settling of mud in Barataria Bay by deploying instruments there as well as analyzing previously-collected data. This research is important in understanding where the sediment from the river diversion will go, such as how much might end up on the marsh.

Quirk is studying the factors influencing subsurface wetland dynamics in coastal Louisiana, which has implications for wetland response to sea-level rise and restoration. Incoming LSU master’s student Elizabeth Harris (Covington, Louisiana) will begin working with Quirk using the CSAP assistantship in Fall 2020.

She will be using a combination of field studies at a subset of sites and Louisiana Coastwide Reference Monitoring System data, or CRIMS data (a network of coastal wetland monitoring stations with standardized measures and fixed sampling schedules for recording surface elevation change, surface accretion rate, water levels, vegetation, and soil characteristics across a range of wetlands), to study wetland elevation dynamics in relation to sea level rise.

These assistantships will allow the students in the College of the Coast & Environment to conduct research relevant to Louisiana’s environmental well-being, expose them to CPRA activities related to their future careers, and provide them with potential avenues to be recruited to a full-time position. Additionally, these assistantships help the faculty to develop closer ties with stakeholders and foster critical collaborative efforts among the coastal research community.