Author: Albert Ruhi

• 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!

• 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‘.

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.

• We are excited to announce that we are starting two undergraduate research projects! Chen Li, URAP scholar, is assisting us with the design of the artificial stream system. Gabby Doerschlag, SPUR scholar, is going to study benthic invertebrates in Strawberry Creek.
• We got a SESYNC working group funded! This is a 2-year, collaborative project with several institutions across the U.S. to work on sustainable water management through dam operations, and advance quantitative (time-series) methods that can help us get there. This project will start in January 2019. More on this soon!
• We hosted Rachel Stubbington, who visited us from Nottingham Trent University (UK) to explore collaborations on intermittent river ecology.
• Also, check out the book chapter on hydrological alteration and biological invasions, part of the book on Multiple Stressors in River Ecosystems (edited by Sabater, Elosegi & Ludwig).
• And last but not least, we received the final pieces of lab equipment we were waiting for: stereomicroscopes, an oven, and a microbalance. Ready for aquatic invertebrate business!

• This has been a hectic summer. We are excited to announce that Kyle Leathers just joined the lab–welcome to our first graduate student!
• We also finalized Lise‘s postdoc project on the alteration-invasion nexus in rivers nation-wide, and she will be soon moving on to bigger things in Seattle. Visiting graduate student Jordi went back to the Catalan Institute for Water Research after a productive stay analyzing stable isotope data from Catalan streams.
• We are NSF funded! An exciting Macrosystems collaborative project (‘Scaling Climate, Connectivity, and Communities in Streams’) will start on January 1st. More on this soon!
• Albert coauthored a Science perspective on the use of remote sensing data to determine the distribution and trends in global freshwater habitat.