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Impacts of stocked fish on zooplankton communities in WY mountain lakes featured in AGU's science news magazine Eos
Impacts of stocked fish on zooplankton communities in WY mountain lakes featured in AGU's science news magazine Eos
Check out a recent publication in American Geophysical Union's science news magazine Eos about our research on how we use lake sediments to track changes in zooplankton communities following fish introductions into mountain lakes of Wyoming
Special thanks to Jasmin Galvan (M.S. Science Communication student from U.C. Santa Cruz) for taking the time to highlight our work!
New paper in Environmental Microbiology on microbial communities from mountain lake sediments in Wyoming
New paper in Environmental Microbiology on microbial communities from mountain lake sediments in Wyoming
Our recent publication details microbial communities from lake sediments from 36 lakes in four mountain ranges in Wyoming (Beartooth, Bighorn, Wind River, and Snowy ranges).
We explore what shapes microbial communities in these remote settings and how they change during the burial process from energy rich environments in the surface sediments to buried sediments where there is limited energy available to microbes.
We found that the microbial communities are remarkably similar despite massive distance between lakes and different lake features (e.g., deep verses shallow lakes, different temperatures, and varied physiochemical properties).
Our findings suggest that there is a high degree of environmental filtering in the sediments. This supports the idea that microbes may preserve evidence of current and past environmental conditions, but that you need to consider the initial burial process which is the major driver of microbial communities in surface sediments.
F I G U R E 1 Conceptual figure of the study design across disconnected mountain ranges. Dots in this figure represent microbes within a lake and the sediment cores below the lake illustrate the changing relative abundances of different microbial taxa. Lakes possess distinct physicochemical characteristics (represented by different lake colors), dispersal potential (represented by the solid lines), and continual burial (represented by dashed lines).
F I G U R E 4 Sediment microbial communities differ based on sediment depth and lake characteristics. Nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) analysis indicates sediment microbial communities vary consistently with sediment depth (NMDS 1). Secondary differences (NMDS 2) are attributed to lake abiotic conditions, separating shallow, warm lakes from deep, cool lakes. PERMANOVA testing indicates all environmental variables had R 2 ≤ 0.053 and p = 0.001.
Inventory of ancient environmental DNA from sedimentary archives
Inventory of ancient environmental DNA from sedimentary archives
Check out our compiled dataset of sedimentary ancient environmental DNA sites hosted on Zenodo!
The dataset includes the coordinates of sedimentary aeDNA sites, what type of sedimentary environment (terrestrial, marine, lake, etc.), targeted taxa, molecular methods (shotgun sequencing, metabarcoding, etc.), and many associated ages!
Talk for JASM 2022 Conference
Talk for JASM 2022 Conference
If you weren't able to make it to the 2022 JASM Conference in Grand Rapids this year, I've brought my presentation to you!
Check out my ~14 minute talk on how microbial communities are organized vertically down core and across large spatial extents.
We also explore how these microbial communities are assembled.
Since these sediment cores are highly isolated, there was potential for these communities to be randomly assembled, but we hope our results surprise you just as much as they surprised us!
Poster for Front Range Microbiome Symposium 2022 Conference
Poster for Front Range Microbiome Symposium 2022 Conference
This spring I attended the Front Range Microbiome Symposium in Fort Collins, Colorado.
We heard about amazing research ranging from using microbes to determine the time of human death to microbial communities of recently formed volcanic islands.
I presented this poster and gave a 5-minute rapid fire talk, which ended up winning the Best Rapid Fire Talk at the symposium!
Core collection in the West
Core collection in the West
Summer 2021 field report: Last summer myself and helpful friends and family went to collect 11 sediment cores from:
Kings Canyon National Park
Yosemite NP
Mt. Rainier NP
North Cascades NP
Grand Teton NP
We collected 5 cores from fishless lakes and 6 from lakes with current fish populations
We also collected cores from a lake in Yosemite NP where fish were eradicated in the 1960s. We found many of the usual suspects who rely on fishless lakes (yellow-legged frog tadpoles, rosy-finches) suggesting that this lake has returned to a pre-fish state, I can't wait to see what the DNA in our sediment tells us about this transition!
This photo is from Mt. Rainier's Crescent Lake, the only large fishless lake we (myself and Mt. Rainier's Aquatic Ecologists) could find in the park!
Project expansion to the West Coast
Project expansion to the West Coast
Sixty percent of all mountain lakes in the West have been stocked with trout. Trout can have negative impacts on the surrounding aquatic and even terrestrial ecosystems. Studies from the Southern Sierra Nevadas indicate that introduction of trout can impact alpine nesting birds by reducing insect subsidies, and are a major contributor to the decline of many native amphibians.
The West Coast also experiences varying degrees of atmospheric nitrogen deposition from human industrialization, with highest rates of deposition occurring in Southern California, intermediate rates in Washington, and lower rates in Wyoming.
Studying the mechanisms behind aquatic community assembly, structure and behavior across a nitrogen gradient, potential climate gradient, and in locations where trout have and have not been introduced will allow us disentangle driving patterns of biodiversity.
Summer 2021 field plans: I plan to sample alpine lakes in Washington and California, in locations where the impacts of fish introduction have been studied. These sites are also locations where some fish populations have been eradicated to restore declining amphibian populations.
Using eDNA in sediment cores
Using eDNA in sediment cores
Lake bottom sediments acting as natural recorders of past environmental conditions provide insight into ecosystem dynamics through time.
Environmental DNA (eDNA) from fish, amphibians, macroinvertebrates, zooplankton, phytoplankton and microbes is preserved in lake sediments.
Using sediment cores from the Wind River and Snowy mountain ranges in Wyoming, I will contrast the impacts of fish introduction, nitrogen deposition, and changes in temperatures within the last 500-1000 years.
Summer 2020 field report: we went into the field with 3 llamas, 3 graduate students, and 80 pounds of dry ice!! We came out with 6 precious sediment cores that are currently being processed back in the lab at University of Wyoming.
Lake sediment cores: tracking ecological change through time
Lake sediment cores: tracking ecological change through time
Fish stocking of trout species occurred in the Wind River Range in Wyoming since the early 1990's.
Introduction of a top predator, such as trout, can have drastic and long-lasting impacts on lake ecology by depleting the lake of large zooplankton and macroinvertebrates.
My research focuses on the timing and magnitude of changes in zooplankton and phytoplankton communities following fish introduction.
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