Hola,
The next Ocean Science Lecture, which is part of our public
lecture series at Harbor Branch, is at 7 pm Wednesday July 24, 2013.
Lectures are held in the auditorium of the Johnson Education
Center on the Harbor Branch campus, 5600 U.S. 1 North, Fort Pierce.
How Do Florida Estuaries Respond to Change? Perspectives
from the Bottom of the Food Web
By Nikki Dix
FAU Harbor Branch
About the Speaker
Nikki Dix grew up in the sunshine state, went to Florida
State University for her B.S. and the University of Florida for her M.S. and
Ph.D. In graduate school, she was
introduced to the beauty and complexity of estuarine ecology and she has been
exploring it ever since. For seven
years, she managed a water quality monitoring program for the Guana Tolomato
Matanzas (GTM) National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR) in St. Augustine,
FL. She used that monitoring data in her
graduate research, along with laboratory-based experiments and oyster reef
sampling, to investigate the impacts of hurricanes and nutrient pollution in
the GTM estuary. Nikki has spent the
past two years as a postdoctoral researcher at Harbor Branch investigating the
relationship between phytoplankton and zooplankton in the Indian River
Lagoon. At the end of August, she will
return to St. Augustine to become Research Coordinator at the GTM NERR.
About the Lecture
In this lecture, Nikki will summarize her graduate and
postdoctoral research in the context of understanding how estuaries respond to
change. Coastal environments are
transition zones, naturally dynamic regions of constant change. To ultimately understand how an estuary
responds to sudden events and long-term stressors, we first have to understand
the inherent variability in the chemical, physical, and biological components
of the estuary through long-term monitoring.
We also need to identify how the different ecosystem components
interact, often with experimental manipulations. Nikki will give examples of these monitoring
and experimental efforts from her research of water quality, plankton, and
oysters in two Florida estuaries and hopes to leave you with an appreciation
for the beautiful complexity that drew her to estuarine ecology originally.
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