The academic achievement of a number of our students were celebrated at the School of Biology and Ecology Annual Recognition Ceremony. From left to right: Masters student Jess Haghkerdar was selected for the highly competitive SBE Graduate Student Travel Award award to present her research on how successional state affects the response of communities to disturbance at the 2016 Society for Freshwater Science conference. Jack McLachlan was awarded the Edith M. Patch - Frank H. Lanthrop Prize in Entomology for his MS research on freshwater insects in tidal freshwater marshes. Chase Gagne received the Auburn E. and Laurana C. Brower Scholarship as an outstanding junior with an interest in entomology, and Jackson Foley received a SBE Academic Award as sophomore with the highest levels of academic achievement. Well done everyone!
Congratulations to Jack McLachlan, who secured a highly competitive 2016 Ecology and Environmental Sciences Summer Graduate Fellowship ($6159). This award is to allow a graduate student to focus full time on writing up and defending a thesis before the end of the summer semester-- So he'd better get a move on!
Hamish and Aram Calhoun (Dept of Wildlife, Fisheries and Conservation Biology) feature in the new book, Indicators and Surrogates of Biodiversity and Environmental Change, edited by David Lindenmayer, Philip Barton, Jennifer Pierson. This book was the product of an Australian Research Council-funded workshop to explore new perspectives in the development and application of surrogates and indicators in natural resource management and conservation. Hamish and Aram contributed the chapter Searching for the holy grail of wetland integrity: are surrogates still relevant in conservation planning? Other products from this group includes A new framework for selecting environmental surrogates published in Science of the Total Environment this month. New paper in Biology Letters, lead by Trisha Atwood, providing evidence that warming alters the influence of nutrients and top predators on CO2 dynamics in ponds. Warming alters food-web driven changes in the CO2 flux of experimental pond ecosystems. Huge congratulations to Eric Veitch for successfully defending his honors thesis entitled “Evidence for aquatic ecosystem augmentation across a gradient of increasing terrestrial subsidy quality”. Eric found that shifts in litter composition from spruce and fir conifers to hardwoods such as maple and beech reduces shredder growth, detritus decomposition rates, and the release of detritus-sourced nutrients.
Congratulations to Cara Rudnicki for rocking the defense of her honors thesis "Effects of Road Salt on the Feeding Rates of Benthic Macroinvertebrates".
New paper in Ecography, led Pete McHugh, showing that drying streams suffer trophic collapse due to habitat contraction. The study focused on New Zealand streams and was in collaboration with Angus McIntosh and Helen Warburton at U Canterbury and Ross Thompson at U Canberra. |