Our new paper in Proc B exploring racial and binary gender representation in introductory biology textbooks is receiving a lot of international attention. Overall, we found that even though the scientists and their discoveries that textbooks are choosing to highlight are becoming more diverse, several groups of scientists including, women of color scientists are woefully under-represented in introductory college textbooks if we compare to the diversification of scientists in the field and especially when comparing to the demographic makeup of the target audience (US undergraduate biology majors).

link to the full article here

The Henning lab is looking for multiple directed studies students for the Fall of 2020 that are interested in aquatic and terrestrial invasive species monitoring projects, or any other ongoing lab projects. We are partnering up with Mobile Bay National Estuarine Program to help lead projects that help us monitor invasive apple snail populations in Langan Park and invasive plant species along the 3-mile creek watershed, including sites on campus.  Email Jeremiah if you are interested!

We are excited to have Polly Straughn joining the Henning Lab.  Polly is a marine sciences major and is going to be leading some work to characterize the biotic and abiotic properties that are shaping sea turtle nesting patterns and survival in a few of our coastal Alabama beaches in collaboration with Alabama Coastal Foundation and Share the Beach.  See the People page on more about Polly and all of us!

Tropical storm Cristobal aided our Marine Botany course by washing up many great specimens of macro algae for us to view under the scope, like this Sargassum sp. We are now in the home stretch of this course as we shift into understanding how global change is impacting current & future marine plant communities and learning how to calculate primary productivity!

Virtual labs can be tough, but students did an amazing job using ImageJ to measure size of the epidermal cells guarding stomata in Phragmites.  I'll consider it a win, students got stuck with the analysis while I got to go out and collect plants and prep the samples.

We are excited to have undergraduate Madison Nelson join the lab for her last semester at South.  As a Biology education major, Madison is going to help us explore some of the eduction-focused research questions we've been asking here at South! Welcome Madison, check out her (and everyone else's Bios on our people page).

J gets to hang out at the sea lab for the next month to teach Marine Botany is part of DISL's undergraduate program which brings together undergraduate students from all the Alabama universities to take courses aimed at marine ecosystems for the summer. 

As a final assignment for Conservation Biology, I pushed students to reflect on what they've learned in the class and what it means for them going forward. I posed a very simple question to them: Are you willing to do something rather than do nothing? Here is a word cloud of their responses!!!!

Conservation students learned plant identification skills and helped establish long-term vegetation monitoring plots on the University of South Alabama campus along with Katie and Madison from Mobile Bay National Estuarine Program!

We've been working hard to isolate arbuscular mycorrhizal spores and dark septate endophyte strains from multiple sites around the Alabama Gulf Coast. Our goal is to isolate and identify strains that confer pathogen protection and enhance growth of coastal plant species in hopes to improve the restoration of coastal plant communities.