The vascular flora of the Lake Thoreau Environmental Center, Forrest and Lamar counties, Mississippi, with comments on compositional change after a decade of prescribed fire

Longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.) ecosystems exhibit high species diversity and are major contributors to the extraordinary levels of regional biodiversity and endemism found in the North American Coastal Plain Province. These forests require frequent fire return intervals (every 2–3 years) to maintain this rich diversity. In 2009, a floristic inventory was conducted at the Lake Thoreau Environmental Center owned by the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The Center is located on 106 ha with approximately half covered by a 100+ year old longleaf pine forest. When the 2009 survey was conducted, fire had been excluded for over 20 years resulting in a dense understory dominated by woody species throughout most of the forest. The 2009 survey recorded 282 vascular plant species. Prescribed fire was reintroduced in 2009 and reapplied again in 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018. A new survey was conducted in 2019 to assess the effects of prescribed fire on floristic diversity. The new survey found an additional 268 species bringing the total number of plants species to 550. This study highlights the changes in species diversity that occurs when fire is reintroduced into a previously fire-suppressed system and the need to monitor sensitive areas for changes in species composition.

Influence of Gender on Perceptions of Barriers to a Police Patrol Career

Policing as an institution has been under immense pressure to increase the representation of women as police patrol officers. As the representation of women in policing has plateaued, increasing research has focused on barriers to women entering patrol work but has not examined the salience of these barriers with respect to males or reliably determined which barriers are most influential to desire to enter a police patrol career prior to employment. Drawing upon survey responses from more than 640 students enrolled in criminal justice courses across five universities (i.e., University of Southern Mississippi, Illinois State University, University of Massachusetts-Lowell, Indiana University-Purdue University Indiana, and Missouri State University), the current inquiry examines the degree to which female and male students differ in their perceptions of barriers to entering a patrol career frequently listed in the literature. The findings indicate that female students view many of these obstacles differently than male students and that these perceptions influence interest in patrol careers.

Ethics and Good Living

Open textbook for PHI 171: Ethics and Good Living at The University of Southern Mississippi

Joanne S. Tornow: Advancing Opportunities for Convergence

Joanne S. Tornow was selected as assistant director for the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Directorate for Biological Sciences (BIO) in February 2019, following almost two decades with the foundation. Her duties ranged from program management to high-level leadership and strategic development, and she previously served as the head of BIO in an interim capacity. Prior to her time at the NSF, Tornow served on the faculty at Portland State University and the University of Southern Mississippi. James M. Verdier interviewed her about the directorate's current operations and future plans in March 2019. An audio version of this conversation can be found as a part of the American Institute of Biological Science's podcast series, BioScience Talks, available at http://bioscienceaibs.libsyn.com. Both versions have been edited for clarity.

A Superhero . . . in Person: Dav Pilkey’s Remarkable Visit and Message

On Thursday, April 14, 2018, I received an early morning text from an old friend. It said:Just wanted to share the below text with you. It came from my daughter, whose son was at the Dav Pilkey celebration yesterday . . . He is in the second grade and suffers from apraxia and dyslexia and is struggling to read. My daughter sent this to our family’s group text:“Today Tyler got to listen to Dav Pilkey [author of Captain Underpants] speak at USM [the University of Southern Mississippi]. He got a signed book. I know it’s the excitement of meeting him but tonight was the first time he picked up a book to read ‘just because.’ He read the whole first chapter.”Sometimes we forget that lives can be changed through the work we do. Thanks for bringing Dave [sic] Pilkey to Hattiesburg!That’s right. Author Dav Pilkey came to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and lives were changed. He was the honoree at the fifty-first Fay B. Kaigler Children’s Book Festival, April 11–13, 2018, and he is the fiftieth individual to receive the silver medallion from USM. The first was Lois Lenski in 1969, so this tradition has a remarkable history.

Everyone’s Invited: A Website Usability Study Involving Multiple Library Stakeholders

This article describes a usability study of the University of Southern Mississippi Libraries’ website conducted in early 2016. The study involved six participants from each of four key user groups – undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and library employees – and consisted of six typical library search tasks such as finding a book and an article on a topic, locating a journal by title, and looking up hours of operation. Library employees and graduate students completed the study’s tasks most successfully, whereas undergraduate students performed fairly simple searches and relied on the Libraries’ discovery tool, Primo. The study’s results identified several problematic features that impacted each user group, including library employees. This increased internal buy-in for usability-related changes in a later website redesign.

The USM campus climate survey: Findings and recommendations

The present investigation of USM Campus Climate was commissioned by the University of Southern Mississippi in 2014, and has been conducted by the Research Initiative on Social Justice and Equity (RISE). RISE is a multi-institutional research consortium with its origins at USM in 2013, and contributions to this report have come from multiple directors, research fellows, research associates, and student fellows of RISE. The data for this project were collected, managed, and have remained under the control and supervision of RISE personnel.We aim in this report to detail the reasons this inquiry was conducted, what we have learned from it, and what we believe are some reasonable recommendations based on the results. Throughout the process of completing this report, we have been in communication with multiple faculty, staff, and student groups to attempt to create a product that is representative of multiple viewpoints, incorporates information about ongoing and upcoming efforts, and that is fair in representing USM as an evolving, unfolding institution working to improve the experience for all students in an environment that is, at times, difficult due to political and financial realities.

Queering South Mississippi: Simple and seemingly impossible work

Our purpose in writing this is to recount and analyze the push for queer-positive policy at The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) over the past several years, understanding the spaces that opened for such work, and why such spaces rapidly open and close on the USM campus. We cannot begin to tell the story of our experience working for queer-positive programming and spaces, and the challenges we have encountered in that work, without first contextualizing that work within the institution of The University of Southern Mississippi, the system in which it exists, and the state of Mississippi. The University of Southern Mississippi, founded in 1910, hovers near the 15,000 mark in enrollment, and has campuses in Hattiesburg, MS and Long Beach, MS, plus some small research sites along the Gulf Coast. It, like many in Mississippi, has constant budget shortfalls, and a cycle of enrollment/financial emergencies, while struggling to find consistent quality of students and enrollment numbers. It exists in a system that places it alongside the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) and Mississippi State University for budgeting and evaluation purposes, an unfortunate reality many years.

The Legacy Lives on, a Year Later: Dr. Stan A. Kuczaj A Special Issue –Part 2

The scientific community has mourned the loss of Dr. Stan Kuczaj, Professor at The University of Southern Mississippi and Director of the Marine Mammal Behavior and Cognition Laboratory, for the past year. In this time of grieving and reminiscing, his scientific legacy has continued to live on through students, collaborators and trusted colleagues. Stan’s passing has acted in part as a motivator to continue to publish works that he invested time and energy in as a tribute, seeing his visions through to fruition. In addition to publishing droves of literature, his colleagues within the development and comparative fields have bound together for the common goal of advancing the science through new collaborations, merged resources, and tackling innovative topics in comparative studies. This second commemorative special issue is a testament to the vast scope of Stan’s impact on the scientific community, as well as his legacy that each of his students and colleagues continues to cultivate. Ten additional papers round out our initial tribute to Dr. Stan Kuczaj in honor of his lifetime achievements.