Contact: Bob Ratliff
Award-winning MSU faculty members Tom Cathcart (l) and Pete Melby
A Mississippi State-developed low-maintenance landscape design for a Biloxi beachfront is earning a regional environmental award.
The Harrison County project by the university's Center for Sustainable Design received a third place Gulf Guardian Award during the Gulf of Mexico Program's recent Clean Gulf 2002 Conference in Galveston, Texas.
The MSU center was established in 1997 by biological engineer Tom Cathcart and landscape architect Pete Melby to enable students in both academic disciplines to gain valuable experience on real-world projects.
A unit of the United States Environmental Protection Agency since 1988, the Gulf of Mexico Program works to protect, restore and maintain the health and productivity in economically sustainable ways of regional oceanic ecosystems. Its Gulf Guardian Awards were established three years ago to honor businesses, community groups, individuals, and agencies in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas that are taking positive steps to keep the Gulf healthy, beautiful and productive.
The MSU-led beach project was launched several years ago as part of Biloxi Bay Chamber of Commerce efforts to beautify a section of the U.S. Highway 90 median at Miramar Park. Since then, the collaborative effort has evolved to include an adjacent three-acre site on which plants are allowed to grow without any maintenance by mechanical equipment.
"The site has remained untouched by beach equipment for seven years and now has a colony of smooth cord grass along the water's edge and 2,600 feet of sea oat plantings that are creating dunes modeled after those on Horn Island," Melby said. "The plantings also have eliminated sand movement off the site onto Highway 90, which is saving the expense of sand removal."
Situated off Jackson County and a part of the federal Gulf Islands National Seashore, Horn was a favorite haunt of famed Ocean Springs artist Walter Anderson. In 1978, Congress designated Horn and nearby Petit Bois Island as wilderness areas, thus protecting two of the last undisturbed barrier islands along the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico.
In addition to sea oats and cord grass, students working on the Biloxi project under the direction of Cathcart and Melby planted cabbage palms, black needle rush and other saltwater marsh plants. The project clearly proved its worth as tropical storms Hanna and Isidore battered the Gulf Coast earlier this fall.
"While the 26 miles of manmade beach on Mississippi's Gulf Coast lost 125,000 cubic yards of sand to the recent storms, our site gained more than 5,000 cubic yards," Cathcart explained. "This is significant because of the expense involved with replenishing manmade beaches, which has to be done routinely every eight to 10 years or out of necessity following storm damage."