Graduate Student Colleagues

Brief summaries of current and former graduate students.

I currently have five graduate students: Charles Cowden and Lisa Krueger are both in their fifth year of PhD projects; Leigh Griggs is in the second year of an M.S., and Luanna Prevost and Steve Hovick have just started their second years, working toward PhDs.

Former students

Brian vanEerden carried out a Master's project examining the relationship of management techniques to reproductive biology of wiregrass, Aristida stricta , in the Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge in northern South Carolina. This project, conducted with funding from a U.S.D.A. grant to Dr. Joan Walker, determined how timing of burns influence the various components of seed set and viability of wiregrass. Brian started in Fall 1994, and finished in May 1997. He is currently a field ecologist with the Virginia chapter of The Nature Conservancy.

No picture available.

Randy Mejeur also worked in the Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge, funded by the same grant to Dr. Walker from U.S.D.A. He studied how timing of burns can be used to enhance restoration of the herbaceous layer species assemblage in longleaf pine plantations. A major part of his thesis focused on Tephrosia virginiana, and examined the patterns of insect seed predation in relation to timing of burns. Randy started in Fall 1995, and finished his M.S. in May 1998. He is currently employed with the environmental consulting firm of Glatting, Jackson, Inc., in Orlando, Florida.

No picture available.

Steven N. Panfil studied the factors that define the boundary between dry forest and adjacent savanna in high plateaus of Bolivia. He examined numerous factors that influence the ability of forest woody species to colonize savanna, by studying the demography of seedlings and saplings at two savanna locations adjacent to intact forest. His seedling and sapling surveys were performed across three years, and encompassed periods before and after natural fires, allowing him to determine how fire influences forest plant colonization of savanna. In collaboration with others, Steve also documented historical patterns of forest vs savanna vegetation over the past centuries and millenia at the same sites, by means of soil carbon isotope ratios. While here at UGA Steve received several awards, including a Franklin College Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, and was a true co-PI on a large Nature Conservancy Research Grant that funded the last two years of his dissertation work. Steve started at UGA in Fall 1994, and completed his PhD in 2001. He now works as the Cloudforest Conservation Manager for the Amazon Conservation Association based in Cuzco, Peru. Steve and his wife Jessica and daughter Cecilia live in Cuzco.

Steven J. Franks investigated how coastal dune plants may have positive effects on one another in an environment of high stress and frequent disturbance. He conducted his PhD dissertation research along the Gulf coast of Florida in Collier County, and on Sapelo Island along the south Georgia Atlantic coast. Steve received Sigma Xi, Audubon Society, and Botany Department grants to fund the work, as well as numerous other awards and honors. Especially notable is that Steve applied for and was awarded a 3-yr competitive graduate research fellowship from the National Estuarine Research Reserve program of NOAA. Steve's dissertation research has been published as three journal articles: Franks, S.J. 2003. Facilitation in multiple life-history stages: evidence for nucleated succession in coastal dunes. Plant Ecology 168 (1): 1-11. Franks, S.J., and Peterson, C.J. 2003. Burial disturbance leads to facilitation among coastal dune plants. Plant Ecology 168 (1): 13-21. Franks, S.J. 2003. Competitive and facilitative interactions within and between two species of coastal dune perennials. Canadian Journal of Botany 81 (4): 330-337. Steve arrived in Fall 1996, and completed his PhD work in 2002. After leaving UGA, Steve spent two years as an ecologist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service’s Invasive Plant Research Laboratory in Ft. Lauderdale FL, studying the impact of invasive exotic plants in coastal Florida vegetation. Currently he is a postdoc with Dr. Art Weiss at University of California, Riverside.

Andrea D. Leach began at UGA in the Fall of 2000, with a B.S. in biology from University of Texas at Austin, and completed her M.S. in June 2003. Andrea studied wind disturbances to forests, and for her thesis asked the question: How does regeneration after a windthrow differ depending on whether or not the site experiences salvage logging? Andrea addressed this with field work in Natchez Trace State Forest in central Tennessee; in Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge, central Georgia; and on the grounds of the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The costs of her thesis work were underwritten by a Cooperative Agreement with the Southern Research Station (Athens branch) of the U.S. Forest Service, to which we express our great appreciation. After completing her M.S. degree with UGA, Andrea spent a year as a research technician at the Athens, GA Forestry Sciences Laboratory of the U.S. Forest Service. Currently she is laboratory manager for the Cellular Biology Department here at UGA.

Jodi Cohen joined the Plant Biology Department at UGA in Fall 2001 with a B.A. in environmental studies from Alfred University in New York, and finished her M.S. degree in Spring 2004. Her project focused on the legacy effects of wind disturbance in forests. She studied older blowdown sites within Cook ForestState Park in western Pennsylvania, to determine whether the microsite variation that influences initial regeneration soon after a catastrophic windthrow, is still influential decades later. Jodi now is an environmental educator at a nature center in Maryland.

Current students

Charles Cowden started at UGA in Fall 2002, after completing a B.S. at William and Mary, and an M.S. at University of Central Florida. Charles is focusing on a different type of organism than others in our lab, although working within the same disturbance/recovery framework. He is asking how mycorrhizae respond to wind disturbance severity, both anthropogenic and natural. He has begun sampling at sites in blowdowns of age 17 yrs, 9 yrs, and 1 yr in old growth stands of the Tionesta Scenic Area within Allegheny National Forest in western Pennsylvania. Some of his work is also based at a 2002 blowdown in Dawsonville State Forest of northern Georgia.

Lisa Krueger began her graduate study here in Fall 2002,having completed a B.S. degree at Furman University in South Carolina. Her primary interest is in the role of deer browsing in forest dynamics. In 2003, Lisa completed a pilot study on how the presence of deer browsing influences microsite preference and abundance of hemlock seedlings in a 1985 tornado blowdown in western Pennsylvania. The results of that study have been published in 2006 in American Midland Naturalist. Another component of Lisa's dissertation is a large experiment that examines whether, and how, deer browsing may alter the realized shade tolerance of several species of tree seedlings. She is conducting both a field experiment and a greenhouse experiment to examine this question. Lisa is also sampling in the 2002 blowdown in Dawsonville State Forest in northern Georgia, where she's attempting to determine the impact of logging slash on deer browsing in a blowdown.

Leigh Griggs joined our department in Fall 2004. Leigh has been examining the composition of rare plant communities in Cherokee National Forest of Tennessee, with the goal of making projections of successional trajectories. Such projections will be valuable for CNF managers, to help them decide on what, if any, management actions might be desired to maintain current composition of these rare communities, or move the current composition to a more desirable composition. She will finish her M.S. at the end of 2006.

Steve Hovick holds an M.S. degree from University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and came to UGA in Fall 2005. Steve’s focus is rather outside the usual scope for students in my lab. His interest is in the interaction of competition and herbivory in controlling species of invasive plants. His project is using experimental mesocosms of the invasive purple loosestrife, to test how resource availability and competition with cattails influence the ability of herbivorous insects to control the spread of loosestrife. The mesocosm experiment that Steve is using is the result of a fortuitous connection that beneficial to all: a University of Pittsburgh PhD student, Dan Bunker, completed his PhD under my friend and colleague Dr. Walt Carson in 2005. Dan used a large array of mesocosms at the Univ. of Pittsburgh field station to study competition among wetland plant species, and the infrastructure remained in situ after Dan graduated. Dr. Carson made available to Steve the opportunity to use Dan's mesocosms for Steve's dissertation work; a very beneficial opportunity. Steve is also the recipient of a UGA Presidential Fellowship, the highest-level scholarship given to incoming UGA grad students.

Luanna Prevost completed her M.S. (Plant and Env. Sci.) at Clemson University prior to joining the Plant Biology Dept. at UGA in Fall 2005. Luanna is interested in the application of island biogeography theory to the conservation of species richness in tropical wet forests. She is testing predictions from the MacArthur-Wilson equilibrium model at two sites in Costa Rica:near Monteverde in the north-central part of Costa Rica, and near the Las Cruces Biological station in the south near the Panamanian border. Her approach involves inventories of the species richness of forest fragments of different size (acres), and different distances from the largest remaining block of intact forest. She will test the theory with both tree data and herbaceous data. Luanna also holds a university-wide scholarship.