I use aquatic insect emergence traps to sample the invertebrate emergence.
Not much is collected at the beginning of the season when the lakes are mostly frozen!
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A color-banded Gray-crowned Rosy Finch
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View My Resume
Area of Research:
I am a graduate student in the Ecology Graduate Group, my area of emphasis is in Conservation Ecology. My research interests are in trophic linkages between aquatic and terrestrial food webs and the effects of introduced species on those linkages.
For my dissertation, I am studying the indirect effects of non-native fish on birds as mediated by competition for different life stages of the same large aquatic invertebrates, specifically mayflies. My study sites for this work are in the Sierra Nevada alpine ecosystem where I am examining the effect of introduced trout on the abundance of lake-derived food for gray-crowned rosy finches. I have been doing this by quantifying differences between fish-containing lakes and fishless lakes, primarily in terms of the abundance of foraging birds and the biomass and species diversity of aquatic insects. At a larger spatial scale I am looking at the numeric response of birds to mayfly emergences, as affected by non-native fish, by comparing indicators of passerine reproductive success in fishless and in fish-containing basins. With my research I hope to better understand the broader ecological effects of fish introductions.
