Leah Kahler and Liz Camuti Awarded Grant from 2025 International Landscape Research Fund

AUGUSt 11, 2025

BY Shyla Krishnappa

Research Assistant Professor, Leah Kahler and Assistant Professor Liz Camuti were recently selected for a grant from Landscape Research Group's 2025 Research Fund themed "Landscape and Mobility: Understanding movements of people, species, and ecosystems in the Anthropocene." LRG's international landscape research fund supports small, high-quality projects to help develop just and sustainable relationships with the places in which we live.

Their project will document the socio-ecological networks of the plant trade in southern Louisiana, examining the diversity of nursery landscapes where plants are grown for publicly-funded coastal restoration projects included in Louisiana's Coastal Master Plan.

By investigating cultivation sites, growing practices, and sourcing networks, this research reveals how plant procurement for these infrastructural projects is responding to—or working against—the need for adaptive and climate-mitigating construction methods in this vulnerable region.

Where do plants in coastal infrastructure projects originate, and who tends them? What can these production landscapes teach us about their effects on local economies, ecologies, and labor dynamics? This investigation explores how intentional plant resource cultivation could create alternative approaches to environmental management in highly engineered coastal landscapes.

Through field research and semi-structured interviews with growers, this project aims to illuminate these largely unseen plant production sites and highlights the collaborative landscape management strategies emerging in response to environmental change.

Read more about the project here.