Center for Coastal Resources Management

Jessica Erin Hines
University of Maryland
Department of Entomology
College Park, MD 20742
Telephone: (301) 512-6454
E-mail: hines@umd.edu

Jes Hines doing CO2 reharvest in the field

When I was an undergraduate at Wake Forest University, I worked in the lab of Bill Connor who was studying insect communication and chemical ecology.  I took his course insect biology and was absolutely taken with the diversity of arthropod behavior and morphology. Shortly after I took his course I went on a field trip with Candy Feller to study plant-insect interactions in mangrove forests at a Smithsonian field site in Belize.  Candy talked to me about experimental design, nutrient limitation, and how to identify insects by their feeding damage on plants.  Candy and Bill had a contagious enthusiasm for understanding the complexity of ecological systems that reinforced the early influences of Tuck Hines.  Tuck let me tag along with him in the field and encouraged me to pursue my own research interests as they took me to Florida, Costa Rica, Colorado, and Hawaii before I started graduate school at the University of Maryland.  At each place I was able to work with scientists whose research interests spanned population genetics, behavior, community, landscape, and ecosystem ecology.  I have been lucky to interact with fantastic mentors at UMD included Margaret Palmer, Bill Fagan, and Pedro Barbosa who taught me the importance of choosing important questions and strengthening my quantitative skills.   Bob Denno taught me how to write an NSF proposal. 

I am currently a PhD student in the Department of Entomology at the University of Maryland.  I enjoy working on salt marshes because they are at the intersection of marine and terrestrial systems.  Understanding community interactions among salt marsh species is an interesting ecological puzzle because the species sort out in a zonal distribution across an elevation gradient from tidal creeks to upland habitats.  I am interested in the strength and consequences of interactions between detritivore and primary producer food webs and factors that cause these interactions to change.  I have approach these questions by using: 1) manipulative experiments that mimic environmental stressors such as elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and nitrogen run off, and 2) observational studies that document the distribution and abundance of species across elevation and latitudinal gradients.  I am grateful to the Garden Club of America for sponsoring my research, which examines the consequences of detritivore community composition for growth and decomposition of salt marsh plants.

Jes and Anne in first CHN analysis