Meeting and seminar with Dr. Tony Stallins

Dr. Tony Stallins visited the Coastal Plant Ecology Lab the weekend following Thanksgiving.  It was a very enlightening visit that has stimulated a lot of ideas regarding plant species, feedbacks with physical processes, island stability, disturbance, and scale.  We will continue to pursue these ideas in our research and in an upcoming BIOL693 seminar - Cross-scale interactions.  Barrier islands are ideal systems for studying resilience theory, alternate states and thresholds because of the strong feedbacks between plants and the physical environment.  Dune building vegetation creates different types of dunes, which affects whole island level processes.  Tony's paper "Stability domains in barrier island dune systems" has been very influential in current CPEL research and discusses the role of vegetation in shaping barrier islands.  We are very grateful to Tony for taking time to meet with us and look forward to future collaboration.