The oats option
A University of Florida professor in the Environmental Horticulture department, Michael Kane is at the forefront of sea oat research. He has received approximately $1.2 million in research funding from the Florida Sea Grant during the last 10 years.
His research includes fundamental and practical studies of micropropagation, a tissue culture technique for producing plants in which offspring are cloned from tissue taken from a single plant. Specifically, Kane uses this process on native aquatic, wetland and coastal plants for habitat restoration. The method is key to preserving Florida’s sand dunes.
Kane and fellow researchers are as close as ever to finding whether or not sea oats can be moved to different regions for dune stablization. After Florida was pummeled by four hurricanes last year, such research is essential for preserving our beaches.
“We are trying to provide solutions to the problems we have in Florida,” Kane says.
To identify the plants best suited to stabilize a sand dune, Kane studies the genetic code of sea oats that have been cloned in labs and grown at four Florida test fields. The two fields on the Gulf coast are located at St. George Island and Egmont Key, while the fields on the Atlantic coast are located at Anastasia and Sebastian Inlet.
Pointing to an aerial photo of the Florida peninsula on a 4-foot poster detailing his sea oat research, Kane explains the importance of the genetic diversity among sea oats of these various regions.
While studying the genetic code of neighboring sea oats, several differences were found not only between the sea oats on the eastern and western coasts but also between plants on the northern and southern Gulf coasts. These differences are due to multiple factors, including the plants’ environments and the conditions they are exposed to, Kane says.
With focus on detailing the plants’ genetic diversity, Kane refers to graphs on the large poster. Colored in blues, teals and greens, the graphs illustrate the data collected from the sea oat characteristics that are evaluated: growth, flowering, root developing and seed set. All of this work is made in an effort to understand how sea oats adapt to certain beach conditions.
“It’s not going to go away, the challenges will continue,” Kane says. “We are just making a dent.”