Seasonal Monitoring and Experimental Evaluations of Aquatic Food Webs in Pinnacles National Park
Albert Ruhi Vidal, Professor
Environmental Science, Policy and Management
Applications for Fall 2024 are closed for this project.
Climate change is shifting the distribution of the Earth’s water resources spatially and temporally. In most of California, multi-year droughts are projected to increase in frequency and magnitude by the end of the century. Predicting the impacts of drought on freshwater ecosystems remains, however, a key challenge.
This is largely because drought operates at multiple scales. Locally, it often causes die-offs of unadapted species; regionally, it fragments habitat and interferes with the dispersal mechanisms that allow species to recolonize. These two processes may interact in important, yet poorly understood ways.
Here we propose to combine observational and experimental approaches to advance our understanding about how stream biodiversity responds to drought. We will focus on aquatic invertebrates, a diverse, key component of aquatic food webs that sustain fishes and frogs of conservation interest in California’s intermittent streams. Over the course of the project, we have seasonally surveyed aquatic invertebrate communities in the Chalone Creek basin, an intermittent stream network that exhibits clear gradients in drought severity and habitat fragmentation, in Pinnacles National Park.
We will 1) study variation in invertebrate taxonomic composition and biological traits across a gradient of drought severity and habitat fragmentation, and 2) combine newly-generated data with existing environmental and biological data to quantify temporal consistency in invertebrate responses to drought.
The research will allow us to identify critical thresholds in hydrologic connectivity and may help design strategies to insure river ecosystem resilience to drought. Identifying ecological thresholds is essential to find ways to balance human and ecosystem needs for fresh water in California’s increasingly variable hydroclimate.
Role: The student’s primary goals will be to sort and identify benthic macroinvertebrates in the lab. Additionally, students will have opportunities to participate in laboratory-based activities that align with their interests as they arise.
Qualifications: No prior experience is required, but skills or coursework in aquatic ecology, engineering, entomology, hydrology, or field research techniques are advantageous and should be mentioned in the application. Importantly, URAP students should be excited to learn about freshwater ecology and collaborate with our lab team.
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Kendall Archie
Hours: 6-8 hrs
Related website: https://nature.berkeley.edu/ruhilab/
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