Author: albert.ruhi

Postdoc researcher Denise Colombano gave a keynote talk at the 2022 Interagency Ecological Program (IEP) Workshop, titled “Strength in numbers: advancing estuarine ecology through data synthesis and collaboration”. She discussed successful research team culture, and provided insights from others through interview clips. Her talk was voted People’s Choice for Best Presentation—watch it on Youtube!

Melissa von Mayrhauser, Ph.D. student (now candidate!) in the Ruhi and Grantham labs, just passed her Ph.D. qualifying exam! Her prospectus is titled Changing Flows, Ecosystems, and Perceptions on the Los Angeles and Santa Clara Rivers, and we are really excited about all the cool research on urban stream ecosystem restoration that’s underway. Congratulations, Melissa!

The paper Energy limitation or sensitive predators? Trophic and non-trophic impacts of wastewater pollution on stream food webs, led by Jordi-Rene Mor, visiting PhD student from Catalonia, was just published in Ecology. Take a look if you are interested in community size spectra!

We’re really thrilled to welcome Rose Mohammadi as a new Ph.D. student in the lab! Rose’s research will focus on how drought affects metacommunity stability, using time-series modeling and field experiments at Chalone Creek, Pinnacles National Park, in the context of our recent NSF CAREER. We extend our warmest welcome to Dr. Rodrigo Sinistro, who just joined the lab as a sabbatical for this upcoming academic year. Rodrigo is a freshwater ecologist from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina), specialized in restoration of eutrophic water bodies, and is bringing some planktonic expertise to the salty side of our research program. Welcome, Rose and Rodrigo!

We just got funding from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (Proposition 1 grant program) to assess how climate variability may be altering food-web dynamics in the San Francisco Bay-Delta via phenological mismatches! This is a collaboration with Prof. Stephanie Carlson (co-PI), involving partners at government agencies (USGS & CDFW) and leveraging cool time-series methods on a range of long-term monitoring data sets in the estuary. Postdocs Denise Colombano and Robert Fournier are doing the heavy-lifting. Stay tuned!

We’re thrilled to announce that the paper “Drought effects on invertebrate metapopulation dynamics and quasi‐extinction risk in an intermittent river network“, led by postdoc Romain Sarremejane, was just published in Global Change Biology. We examined how stream invertebrate metapopulations respond to seasonal drying and to supraseasonal drought–and how the latter can synchronize dynamics of some (but not all) species, decreasing their long-term persistence. It was a really fun collaboration with stream ecologists and hydrologists in the UK. Check it out!