Name: Charles Lane
Time connected to the CFW: ~1997-2003
Current position: Senior Research Scientist at the U.S. EPA Office of Research and Development
What is your favorite memory from the CFW?
Spending days and weeks traveling central Florida sampling “isolated” marshes with colleagues and good friends, identifying plants, collecting water, diatom, and macroinvertebrate samples, and thinking about the factors affecting the systems. Oh, and throwing the disc around in the field and sometimes across and throughout the wetlands and watching sunsets over flatwoods ponds and cypress domes
Why do you think the CFW is important?
In the two decades since I’ve left the CFW, I’ve been repeatedly reminded of how important a systems perspective is to understanding different parts of the landscape and how they interact across space, time and scales. Systems thinking, wetlands ecology writ large, and policy (i.e., the human decision-making structures) have driven my research into non-floodplain wetlands and their individual and cumulative effects. The CFW was critical in creating those links that, I hope, have made me a better scientist.