There are two areas of research our lab is most interested in:
1) Macrosystems Ecology of Stream Drying
Community ecologists are often interested in how abiotic (climate, geomorphology, hydrology) factors act as a set of filters that control which species can persist in a given location. The effect of drying not been strongly considered as an abiotic factor that might structure stream ecosystems. A major focus of ongoing research in our lab is comprised of three different projects focused on stream drying. This work is advancing basic ecology research and also relevant to ongoing policy debates on environmental protections for streams that dry. There are two goals of this research are to: 1) to understand how drying affects different components of stream ecosystems, and 2) to understand how this effect varies geographically.
2) Global Change in Freshwaters using Data Synthesis
The world’s streams and rivers are in a state of pervasive change. As stream ecologists we are interested in how these changes impact the organisms that live in fluvial systems, and how changes impact community and ecosystem dynamics. We have a number of projects that focus on creative uses of large scale hydrologic and biomonitoring datasets, and meta-analyses of published studies, to help us understand and predict the impact of anthropogenic change in freshwaters.
CURRENT FUNDED PROJECTS
AIMS (Aquatic Intermittency effects on Microbiomes in Streams) is a collaborative research project that will study the effects of drying on water quality, biogeochemistry, and microbiomes in streams in the Mountain West, Great Plains, and Southeastern Forest regions of the US. This project is led by Amy Burgin at the University of Kansas, and other collaborators include Erin Seybold (KU), Sam Zipper (KU), Jay Johnson (KU), Jamene Brooks-Kieffer (KU), Josh Meisel (Haskell Indian Nations University), Lydia Zeglin (Kansas State University), Carla Atkinson (University of Alabama), Jon Benstead (UA), Nate Jones (UA), Kevin Keuhn (University of Southern Mississippi), Colin Jackson (University of Mississippi), Sarah Godsey (Idaho State University), Rebecca Hale (ISU), Ken Aho (ISU), Kathleen Lohse (ISU), and Yaqi You (State University of New York). This project is funded by the National Science Foundation as part of the EPSCoR program, and will run from 2020-24.
StreamCLIMES is a collaborative research project that will study the effects of drying on stream ecosystems across the southern US. This asks how drying impacts community structure, food web dynamics, and genetic connectivity project of benthic macroinvertebrates. Collaborators include Michael Bogan at the University of Arizona, Katie Costigan at the University of Louisiana Lafayette, Meryl Mims at Virginia Tech, Ben Ruddell and Abe Springer at Northern Arizona University, Albert Ruhi at the University of California Berkeley, Robert Pastel at Michigan Tech University, and Tom Neeson and Yang Hong at the University of Oklahoma. You can follow us on Twitter @StreamCLIMES. This project is funded by the National Science Foundation as part of the Macrosystems Biology program and will run from 2019-2023.
The Dry Rivers Research Coordination Network is a network of ecologists and hydrologists who study streams that do not always flow. Collaborators on this project include Katie Costigan, Kate Boersma, Michael Bogan, Thibault Datry, Ken Fritz, Sarah Godsey, Stephanie Kampf, Meryl Mims, Julian Olden, Albert Ruhi, Adam Ward, Margaret Zimmer, Emily Bernhardt, Walter Dodds, Jay Jones, and others. You can follow us on Twitter @DryRiversRCN. This project is funded by the National Science Foundation and will run from 2018-2022.