Southeastern NEWS

                                                       Southeastern Louisiana University
                                           Public Information Office
                                           publicinfo@selu.edu
                                           SLU 10880, Hammond, LA 70402
                                           985/549-2341/fax 985-549-2061
    Date: 4/16/02
      Contact:                           Christina Chapple 12A

Editors: Photo accompanies release
WETLANDS BIOLOGISTS CONSTRUCTS "TURTLE COVE IN A BOTTLE" TO
DISCOVER HOW PLANTS COMPETE
     HAMMOND -- It's a tough world out there   even for plants.
     "Plants kill each other by the tens of thousands," said wetlands biologist Paul Keddy of
Southeastern Louisiana University. "They're all busily trying to steal resources from each other,
to shade each other out. For every acorn that grows, 999 little oaks don't make it."
     Understanding plants' battles for survival, Keddy says, would not only be a valuable
addition to scientific knowledge, it also could be a factor in saving Louisiana's threatened
wetlands.
     "To efficiently restore wetlands, that is to 'put the pieces back together,' it is imperative
that we understand the connections between species and environmental factors," said the
Canadian-born scientist, who joined Southeastern's faculty in 1999 as the Edward G. Schlieder
Chair in Environmental Studies. 
     While research, including studies by Keddy's Southeastern colleagues, has pinpointed
flooding and salinity as threats to Louisiana marshes, less is known about the effects of
biological
interactions, such as plant competition, said Keddy, whose award-winning 1989 book on the
subject of competition was published in an expanded second edition last year. 
     To discover basic facts about how plants respond to each other and the environment, he
plans to build a miniature marsh, a microcosm of Southeastern's Turtle Cove Environmental
Research Station on Pass Manchac, in a pond on the Hammond campus. The research project is
being funded by a $365,000, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation. 
     "Southeastern's research at Turtle Cove tells in the short run how to manage Lake
Pontchartrain. This research will be more fundamental," Keddy said. "We are asking how living
things fit together around us."
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TURTLE COVE IN A BOTTLE   Add One
     "We're going to reconstruct 'Turtle Cove in a bottle,'" he said.  
     Keddy and his research team will plant thousands of common Louisiana marsh plants in
the approximately 200-square-foot pond, located at Southeastern's outdoor classroom on the
northeast corner of campus. The pond will be specially contoured to create planting
environments ranging from six feet above to six feet below the waterline.
     The scientists will observe how competition changes the composition of the 12 different
species of plants in the gradients. Will the species coexist? Will they compete, but each stay in a
specific portion of the gradient? Or, will "winner take all," with one species eliminating the
other? 
     "We're going to build a little coliseum and let the plants battle it out," said Keddy.
     Work will soon begin to shape the pond into the gently sloping environmental gradients.
Then, Keddy, his assistant Michaelyn Broussard, and their student workers will begin the down-
and-dirty work of planting and maintaining the thousands of plants. 
     The 12 varieties of plants have been growing in a nursery in Amite, waiting to be
transplanted into the pond. Keddy said they range from saw grass -- a huge sedge, tall as a person
--  that is prevalent in the Everglades, to pickerel weed, which puts out large stems of purple
flowers and can be seen in the wetland prairies in the Lake Pontchartrain Basin. 
     "I know there are 1,000 individual cattails in pots," said Broussard, who will be either
doing or supervising much of the labor that will go into the planting and maintenance.
     "We will have to hand weed to keep out species we don't want," Keddy said. "A few
lucky persons will get to kneel in the mud with tweezers to put those out."
     Keddy expects to run the competition experiment for three years, then spend the
remaining two years of the grant compiling the findings.
     "The conservation and management of wetlands must be built upon a scientific
understanding of how wetlands function, and how the species within them interact," he said.
"Remarkably, far too much wetland-related work overlooks important processes such as changes
in water levels, fertility and competition. The natural variation in such factors is essential for
producing and maintaining the array of wetlands currently found in our landscapes."
                             -SLU-
Press release available online at www.selu.edu/news/spring02.html