Dr. Debra A. Willard

Dr. Willard received her Ph.D. and M.S. in botany from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She spent one year at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History as a postdoctoral fellow analyzing phylogenetic relationships among Carboniferous lycopsids and integrating palynological work with megafossil and sedimentological analyses to evaluate the long-term response of terrestrial ecosystems to paleoenvironmental changes during the Paleozoic. In 1991, Dr. Willard went to USGS as part of the Pliocene Research, Interpretation, and Synoptic Mapping (PRISM) project to determine patterns of vegetational response to Plio-Pleistocene climatic changes in the North Atlantic region. She now is investigating ecosystem responses to anthropogenic and climatic changes in coastal regions of the mid-Atlantic and southeastern United States, including the Everglades of south Florida, Chesapeake Bay, North Carolina, and Tampa Bay.

Relevant to the biota of the Gulf of Mexico, Dr. Willard has published the following:

Wingard, G. L., S. Ishman, T. Cronin, L. E. Edwards, D. A. Willard, and R. B. Halley. 1995. Preliminary analysis of down-core biotic assemblages: Bob Allen Keys, Everglades National Park, Florida Bay. United States Geological Survey Open-File Report 95-628.