Ecological studies are the bridge that link biodiversity and global change issues. Please
join us at the first Fall 2009 lecture in the Harvard University Center for the
Environment and Bank of America series on
Biodiversity, Ecology, and Global Change
"Food Webs in River Networks: Algal Mediated Linkages of Rivers to Watershed and
Nearshore Marine Ecosystems"
Mary Power
Professor, Integrative Biology, University of California Berkeley and Director, California
Biodiversity Center
TODAY
5:00 pm
Harvard University
Biolabs Lecture Hall
16 Divinity Ave
Cambridge, MA
We know too little about the spatial and temporal contexts of food webs to forecast how
they will respond to environmental change. Interacting web members often derive their
energy and constituent molecules from different environmental source areas ("resource
sheds"). Better knowledge of consumers’ resource sheds would help us predict the
population and food web consequences of spatially explicit environmental change. Organisms
can also block resource fluxes to other consumers. Mapping out these "resource
shadows" would help us understand consequences of population changes, invasions or
losses of species. Resource fluxes and species performances and interactions are strongly
influenced by topography and large vegetative structure. We have been using a
"predictive mapping" approach to investigate how resource fluxes and food web
regimes change with partially predictable changes in environmental controls down a river
drainage network. In this talk, Mary Power will focus on regimes that control the
production and fate of dominant primary producers (macroalgae, diatoms and cyanobacteria),
and explore how predictive mapping might help us forecast ecosystem response, including
algal-mediated linkages of river, aerial, and nearshore marine ecosystems, to changes in
climate, land use, or biota.
Mary Power’s lab at the University of California Berkeley investigates food webs in rivers
and their watersheds. She is interested in how attributes of species influence their
effects in food webs, and how species interactions change under different environmental
regimes. Topics of current interest include: interplay of trophic dynamics with
hydrologic and productivity regimes in rivers potential effects of climate change on food
webs in rivers and meadows; impacts of invading exotic species food web links between
rivers and their watersheds, specifically, the influence of river-derived insect
production on terrestrial consumers in watersheds (spiders, lizards, bats); effects of
fine bed sediments on juvenile steelhead and the food webs that support their growth
changes in energy sources to food webs down drainage networks; landscape controls on
stream metabolism, fluxes, and consumer-resource interactions; and the interplay between
spatial fluxes of energy and nutrients to food webs and outcomes of local species
interactions.
The Biodiversity, Ecology, and Global Change lecture series is sponsored by the Harvard
University Center for the Environment with generous support from Bank of America. This
lecture is free and open to the public. A reception will follow in the Biolabs lobby.
Contact:
Lisa Matthews
Events Coordinator
Harvard University Center for the Environment
24 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
lisa_matthews(a)harvard.edu
p. 617-495-8883
f. 617-496-0425
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