Coastal Studies Center
Faculty Research
Faculty Research
Coastal Studies Scholars
Vladimir Douhovnikoff 2009
A conversation with Emily Guerin '09
Vladimir Douhovnikoff has spent much of this year fighting his way through tall grass in the marshes of the New Meadows River. As the Coastal Studies Center Scholar, Douhovnikoff is studying clonal growth in Phragmites, the invasive grass that has expanded into salt and fresh water marshes along coastal Maine. Douhovnikoff is trying to understand why the aggressive Phragmites is able to outcompete native grasses and take over marshes like the ones in the New Meadows. The grass thrives in nutrient-rich areas and its expansion has been aided by the indiscriminant use of fertilizers. According to Douhovnikoff, the grass creates “a biological desert” in the marshes it invades.” When it’s there you know it,” he said.
The project has two components. First, Douhovnikoff is comparing invasive and native grasses to see how they spread. Then he is looking at different sites on the New Meadows River to see how each of the Phragmites stands is related to one another. He will determine whether the grasses are “one large clone, one family, or whether they are non-related.” Because Phragmites can be difficult to distinguish from native grasses, Douhovnikoff has enlisted the help of Eric Hazleton, who Douhovnikoff describes as “a local expert.”
“He shows me the ropes,” Douhovnikoff said.
When his one-year appointment at Bowdoin is up, Douhovnikoff will return to Simmons College in Boston, where he is an assistant professor of biology. Being on sabbatical from Simmons and receiving the CSC Scholar position gave Douhovnikoff the opportunity to start a project in a new area that is related to his research interests. “Without sabbatical and the support of this scholarship I wouldn’t have been able to do that,” he said. He hopes to publish a paper on his Phragmites research sometime this summer.
The New Meadows project ties in with Douhovnikoff’s previous research. He studies how human and natural disturbances affect ecological processes, specifically reproduction in plants. He focuses on plants like Phragmites that reproduce vegetatively, or by cloning, in addition to sexually. In the past Douhovnikoff has studied riparian and hardwood woodlands, grasslands and conifer forests.
In addition to researching, Douhovnikoff taught a sub-100 level biology course this fall, “Ecology and Society,” and will give a lecture later this spring.
When not working on the Phragmites project or teaching, Douhovnikoff works on a range of other research endeavors. One of those is with The Nature Conservancy (TNC) on the St. John’s River project in far northern Maine. Ten years ago TNC purchased the 185,000-acre plot from International Paper. TNC intended to continue sustainably harvesting the forest and pursued Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification, as well as protecting the habitat of the endangered Canada lynx. Douhovnikoff is working with the TNC on a species inventory of the land, and said he was “interested in getting back into my forestry background.”
Douhovnikoff completed his PhD at the University of California Berkeley. He began studying environmental policy, but switched to forest ecology after meeting an influential professor. He said the defining moment for him was the Forestry Field Camp, a two-month long residential summer program in the northern Sierra Nevada. “That summer my ecology professors were my guides, showing me how the natural world worked. The best way to learn ecology is to be immersed in the ecosystem you are studying. In many ways this program was similar to the Kent Island opportunity available to Bowdoin students,” he said.
Before pursuing ecology in graduate school, Douhovnikoff majored in Soviet Studies, also at UC Berkeley. He spent time after college in Russia assessing industrial facilities for an international consulting firm. He said he became interested in environmental policy after seeing the environmental degredation and pollution many of these factories were producing. While recognizing the scale of the problem, he lacked the vocabulary to describe it and expertise to address it, so he decided to return to grad school.