UC Berkeley's Freshwater Research Group
We are excited to officially open a new research center at UC Berkeley, focusing on the environmental and social dimensions of cannabis agriculture in California.
Check out our write-up in BerkeleyNews, a blog post by co-director Eric Biber at the UC Berkeley Law School, and our new website for more information.
Our latest post in CaliforniaWaterBlog describes how environmental outcomes can be improved when water is allocated using a functional flow approach. Read more here!
In the latest issues of Breakthroughs, the magazine of the College of Natural Resources, we identify five key lessons from our experiential education course, the UC Water Academy.
I am Kyle Leathers, a first-year PhD student interested in how aquatic communities are affected by environmental stressors, species interactions, and the combination between the two. My research investigates these topics, focusing on the effects of thermal regimes on stream food webs controlled by the predatory Coastal Giant Salamander (Dicamptodon tenebrosus).
I will apply observational, experimental, and modeling approaches to achieve realism, control, and generalizability in this research. Diverse pool-riffle sites throughout a watershed and artificial streams provide relevant scales for fieldwork and experiments respectively. I will use random forest algorithms to determine the relative importance of warming to community structure. Additionally, I will test food web stability using stable isotope analysis. My results will ultimately inform a Spatial Stream Network (SSN) model that predicts stream food-web structure and Coastal Giant Salamander abundance under future climate change scenarios. Understanding how food-web structure responds to increased water temperature can improve our ability to anticipate associated risks such as trophic cascades, pollutant bioaccumulation, and algal blooms.
The group moved from Mulford Hall to Wellman Hall during Fall 2018. Everyone chipped in and helped pack up, clean up, and then unpack in the new space. This was a multi-step (multi-month?) effort, and one big step towards our goal of creating a freshwater science cluster in Wellman Hall!
The Public Policy Institute of California has released a briefing kit on managing California’s water, highlighting the state’s most pressing issues including climate change, drought, headwater forest management, and securing safe drinking water supplies to disadvantaged communities.
Read our latest post on CaliforniaWaterBlog:
Getting Strategic about Freshwater Biodiversity Conservation in California
Understanding how freshwater ecosystems respond to environmental change requires knowing whether recent changes are within the bounds of natural variation or if these systems are, instead, entering new states.
I am Xavier Benito-Granell, an aquatic ecologist and new SESYNC Postdoc Fellow working on questions that revolve around the long-term resilience of diatom communities and their ability to capture regime shifts in lakes. My project, co-developed with my external mentor Albert Ruhi, aims at identifying abrupt transitions in palaeoenvironmental records of high-elevation Andean lakes.
We are applying time-series methods on a unique combination of diatom community data, biophysical data (pollen and sediment geochemistry), and human data (archaeological records). This historical perspective combines data at decadal to millennial scales, and allows asking whether early-warning signals precede regime shifts–something that would be useful to try identify lakes that may be on the verge of a critical transition. We hope this work will advance our understanding of the long-term dynamics and trajectories of high-altitude lakes, and of their responses to ongoing anthropogenic and environmental change.
Paramo landscape around Lake Patoquinuas, Cajas National Park (Ecuador)