Dr. John W. Day

John W. Day, Jr. is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences and the Coastal Ecology Institute, School of the Coast & Environment at Louisiana State University, where he has taught since 1971. He has published extensively on the ecology and management of coastal and wetland systems and has over 100 peer-reviewed publications. He is co-author (with M. Kemp, C. Hall, and A. Yáñez-Arancibia) of Estuarine Ecology, coeditor (with C. Hall) of Ecological Modeling in Theory and Practice, coeditor (with W. Conner) of The Ecology of the Barataria Basin, An Estuarine Profile, and coeditor (with A. Yáñez-Arancibia) of the Ecology of Coastal Ecosystems in the Southern Mexico: The Terminos Lagoon Region.

Professor Day received his PhD in marine sciences and environmental sciences from the University of North Carolina in 1971 working with Dr. H.T. Odum. Since then, he has conducted extensive research on the ecology and management of the Mississippi Delta region and for the last 25 years, he has studied coastal ecosystems in Mexico. He was a visiting professor in the Institute of Marine Sciences of the National University of Mexico in 1978-1979, at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands during 1986, at the Laboratoire d'Ecologie, Unversité Claude Bernard in Arles France during 1992-93, and in the Department of Geography at Cambridge University in 2000-2001. He has also worked with the University of Campeche and the Institute of Ecology in Xalapa, Mexico. Since 1992, Professor Day has worked in the Mediterranean studying the impacts of climate change on wetlands in Venice Lagoon and in the Po, Rhone and Ebro deltas. He is presently working on using wetlands as a means of removing nitrogen from the Mississippi River. Dr. Day also served as a member of the hypoxia reassessment taskforce and published with Dr. William Mitsch an article in BioScience on approaches to removing nitrogen from the Mississippi River. He is presently serving as chair of the National Technical Review Committee that oversees the Louisiana Coastal Area program, the restoration program for the Mississippi delta. In 1988, Dr. Day received the School of the Coast & Environment Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award and in 2000, he received the Lipsey Professional Educator Award. In 2003, the Estuarine Research Federation presented Dr. Day with the National William A. Niering Education Award.

Research Interests

• Estuarine Ecology
• Systems Ecology
• Wetland Ecology
• Ecological Modeling
• Effects of Humans on Natural Systems
• Tropical Coastal Ecology

GoMRI-funded projects:

- Aquatic Primary Productivity and Spatial/Temporal Water Quality Variations of the Breton Sound Estuary and Impacts of Oil Pollution (Year One Block Grant - The Northern Gulf Institute, Role: Principal Investigator)

Impact of Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill on the Louisiana Coastal Environments (Year One Block Grant - The Northern Gulf Institute, Role: Co-Principal Investigator, Task Lead)