We’re really excited to welcome two new postdocs in the lab: Drs. Travis Apgar & Robert Fournier. They will work on different aspects of our program at Pinnacles National Park, focused on the effects of seasonal and supraseasonal drying on stream invertebrate communities. Robert is joining us from the University of Arkansas, and Travis from UC Santa Cruz. Welcome to Berkeley!
Author: Albert Ruhi
Biodiversity benefits of restoring wetlands
Hi! I am Zhenhua Sun, visiting Ph.D. student in the lab. During my stay I have been gathering data on water quality and macroinvertebrate community composition in ponds and wetlands across the globe. Our study areas and collaborators span Argentina, Canada, France, Ireland, Norway, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, and the US!
In particular, we are asking whether natural, agricultural, and highway ponds differ in the contributions they make to landscape-scale biodiversity. In turn, this could in stormwater pond design, so that these elements of green infrastructure maximize ecosystem benefits.
Stay tuned for a forthcoming paper on the topic!
Updates – Sept & Oct 2019
- The lab is full steam ahead this Fall 2019! We started scouting sites for our CADFW Delta restoring wetlands project, we are building traps for the field experiment at Pinnacles, and we are making progress in our data-driven projects (river-reservoir dynamics, CA drought, created wetlands, metacommunity stability).
- Guillermo and Kyle presented at the California chapter of the Society for Freshwater Science (CalSFS) – California Bioassessment Workgroup (CABW) meeting at UC Davis.
- Albert coauthored a review in Science, with SESYNC director Margaret Palmer, on the importance of flow regime for river ecosystem restoration. Check it out here! [see associated interview].
- The lab hosted Sebastien Rauch and Ekaterina Sokolova, who visited us from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.
- The lab also hosted John Sabo, director of Future H2O (Arizona State University), with whom we continue to collaborate on spectral methods and hydrologic regime shifts.
- Albert joined the editorial board of Conservation Letters, a leading journal on interdisciplinary conservation science.
More soon! 🙂
The lab is growing!
- We welcome Jessie Moravek and Megan Pagliaro to the Ruhi Lab! Jessie is interested in studying the impacts of hydropower dams, and potential for mitigating them via reoperation and removal; and will be co-advised by Justin Brashares. Megan has been putting together an exciting research project on wetland restoration trajectories in the San Francisco Bay. Read more about them and their inspiring interests!
- We also look forward to hosting Tadeu Siqueira, Brazilian sabbatical visitor who received a FAPESP grant to research metacommunity dynamics under environmental fluctuations; as well as Ph.D. student Zhenhua Sun, who is visiting this Fall from Sweden to study biodiversity benefits of stormwater ponds. Welcome all!
Busy Spring, exciting Summer
- The Lab organized a special session at the Society for Freshwater Science Annual Meeting (Salt Lake City, Utah), in collaboration with Kurt Anderson (UC Riverside). As part of the session, Kyle presented a poster on the effects of snowmelt timing; Guillermo a talk on his new analyses on the effects of drought on spatial patterns of invertebrate communities; and Albert the work of former postdoc Lise Comte, on the drivers of fish invasion in the U.S.
- Albert and Tongbi led the first workshop of the ‘WaterSystems’ SESYNC Pursuit (link); and participated in a new USGS Powell Center workshop on dams and flow regime alteration (link). Both were productive and a lot of fun! Albert also participated in an iDiv workshop in Germany, on the topic of ecological synchrony, co-led by former postdoc Lise Comte.
- Albert gave a seminar at Oregon State University (Ecology, Evolution and Conservation of Biodiversity), and at UC Berkeley (ESPM – Wildlife and Conservation Biology Seminar Series). He also participated in the Delta Independent Science Board, on a panel discussion on the ‘Roles and Impacts of Non-native Species’.
- This Summer, Kyle and Gabby are running an experiment to simulate the effects of end-of-the-century flow conditions (aka early snowmelt and longer low flows) on stream food webs, using artificial channels at the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Lab. Kyle was awarded a VESR graduate student grant, and a Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. Congrats, Kyle!
- Incoming Ph.D. student Jessie Moravek was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and a Berkeleyan award (Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study). Well done, Jessie!
We got funding to study restoring wetlands!
The Ruhi Lab will receive funding from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, for the project ‘Reconnecting Delta food webs: evaluating the influence of tidal marsh restoration on energy flow and prey availability for native fishes’. This Fall we will start a 3-year project combining analyses of community composition, stable isotopes, and sensor time-series data, in collaboration with USGS and ICF, via State Water Contractors. More soon!
Modeling river-reservoir dynamics
I am Tongbi Tu, a new postdoc in the lab. I am working on a SESYNC Pursuit to study causal pathways and feedbacks within complex water management systems. This project integrates ecology, hydrology, and water law. The interdisciplinary team is composed of Sankar Arumugam (NCSU), Xiaoli Dong (UC Davis), Caitlin Dyckman (Clemson Univ.), Ted Grantham (UC Berkeley), Lars Olson (Univ. of Maryland), Benjamin Ruddell (Northern Arizona Univ.), Nicola Ulibarri (UC Irvine), and Albert Ruhi (UC Berkeley).
In this working group we will apply physically-based and time-series models to investigate how reservoirs can help provide engineered resilience to socio-environmental systems–especially during periods of drought. We will use a variety of approaches to detect direct and indirect causal pathways and feedbacks between hydrologic conditions, human uses, and downstream ecological outcomes in the Lower Colorado River basin. A better understanding of the complex dynamics of water systems can help advance sustainable freshwater management–a critical need in the face of increasing competition for scarce freshwater resources.
Oct-Dec 2018 updates
- Akira Terui, postdoc from the University of Minnesota, visited the lab in early November for an ongoing collaboration on the Moran effect.
- Xavier Benito, SESYNC Postdoc Fellow, visited the lab in mid November to analyze diatom community time-series data.
- Albert gave a seminar at UC Riverside (Evolution, Ecology, & Organismal Biology Colloquium)
- We participated at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in Washington, D.C., with the presentation ‘Understanding the cumulative effects of dams on regional streamflow dynamics‘.
Emergent effects of warming on stream food webs
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.
A palaeocological perspective into resilience
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)