January 3, 2003

Mississippi Yearning: Reawakening an Ecosystem

By MALCOLM G. SCULLY

Eric D. Dibble sometimes calls his backyard project a mere hobby, but it is clearly more than that. He has managed to get the federal government to pay for much of it, and over the past three years he has used it as a training ground for some 260 students -- undergraduate and graduate -- in his courses on applied and advanced ecology.

With funds from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wetlands Reserve Program, Dibble, an associate professor of wildlife and fisheries at