Emily Stanley - US grants

9632853 Magnuson Lakes are central to the vitality of landscapes and society. As collectors of water, energy, solutes, and pollutants from the landscape and atmosphere, as habitats for aquatic biota, and as attractors of human activities, lakes affect and are affected by natural and human-induced changes in the local and regional landscape and atmosphere. The North Temperate Lakes Long-term Ecological Research program seeks to understand the long-term ecology of lakes and their interactions with a range of relevant landscape, atmospheric, and human processes. This program has the following interrelated goals: * Perceive long-term changes in the physical, chemical, and biological properties of lake ecosystems, * Understand interactions among physical, chemical, an biological processes within lakes and their influence on lake characteristics and long-term dynamics, * Develop a regional understanding of lake ecosystems through an analysis of the patterns and processes organizing lake districts, * Develop a regional understanding of lake ecosystems through integration of atmospheric, hydrologic, and biotic processes, and * Understand the way human, hydrologic, and biogeochemical processes interact within the terrestrial landscape to affect lakes and the way lakes, in turn, influence these interactions. Research will examine patterns, processes, and interactions of lakes and their surroundings at a nested set of spatial and temporal scales. This comprehensive long-term research program will yield important understanding of landscape-lake-human interactions that will have direct relevance to development of policies affecting the future of the Upper Great Lakes Region and enhancement of the quality of life for its residents.

Stanley 0108619 - This research offers a rare opportunity to investigate the effects of dam removal on the physical environment and biogeochemical processes, including anthropogenic disturbance impacts, ecological succession, sediment transport, and nutrient retention. This is a poorly understood area with little reliable data, and the project will capitalize on recent and upcoming dam removals in Wisconsin's Baraboo River, the longest river restored to free-flowing conditions in the Unites States. The project will obtain information critical to understanding and managing dams and dam removals. The study unites basic science with management objectives by addressing conceptual ecological models of riverine system function, and how anthropogenic structural alterations evolve over time into more natural wetland habitats. The models developed during this project have broad applicability for river management and the advancement of ecological succession theory.

Human activities have caused widespread changes in the availability of nutrients such as nitrogen in many U.S. streams and rivers. Increases in nutrients can compromise water quality, disrupt normal ecological processes, and in extreme cases, pose serious human health risks. Thus, there is a pressing need to reduce nutrient concentrations in these ecosystems. Our goal is to determine if and how floodplains can act as filters for removing excess nitrogen from the Wisconsin River. We will investigate the effectiveness of floodplains in removing nitrogen during flooding, and how this ability is influenced by the composition of the floodplain forest. Leaves from floodplain trees provide the fuel for nitrogen removal from river water, so any change in the amount or type of this fuel potentially affects nitrogen removal. Results will be published in the scientific literature and shared with organizations involved in nutrient management and river restoration projects.

This award provides partial support for construction of a new, 1400 sq.ft., 4-bedroom housing unit that will increase housing capacity of the University of Wisconsin's Trout Lake Station by 20% and, in addition, provide needed small-group meeting space. The institution is providing additional funding to support the project. Trout Lake Station is located in the Northern Highland Lake District of Wisconsin, where it provides access to a wide variety of aquatic ecosystems and their surrounding landscapes. More than 2500 lakes are within 50km of the station. The station has a long history of aquatic research that continues to the present day. Recent research activity is reflected in 182 peer-reviewed publications and 28 graduate student theses attributed to projects conducted at the station since 2000. These are in addition to more than 800 publications and theses published prior to 2000. In addition to fostering research, the Trout Lake Station is used regularly for field trips by undergraduate and graduate courses from universities throughout the Midwest. Use of the station has grown to a level where housing capacity severely restricts both current activities and development of new research, teaching, and outreach programs. Use of the station has averaged about 9100 user-days/year over the last three years, a record high. The limited overnight housing at the station has begun to prevent the station prevent the station from welcoming visiting scholars, and impeded the ability of supervising faculty members to oversee the work of graduate and undergraduate students spending the summer at the station. Besides hosting research leading to new knowledge of the long-term dynamics of lakes, the impact of exotic species, and the impact of human activities, the station provides opportunities for student training, and outreach to the general public, including community participation in developing scenarios for the future of the Northern Highland Lake District, and presentations to community groups by local and visiting experts.

Microbes are responsible for most of the carbon and nutrient cycling in freshwater lakes, and influence both local water quality and global carbon budgets. However, it is not currently possible to predict which types of microbes will be found in a particular lake at a particular time, or to predict how a microbial community would respond to environmental change. Microbial biologists need to learn more about how microbes in lakes assemble into communities, the role of drivers such as competition, predation, resource availability, disturbance, and natural selection in shaping these assemblages. This project addresses the following overarching question: What forces organize microbial communities in humic lakes? Microbes and their communities respond to many forces acting at different spatial and temporal scales, and the effect of these forces can be observed at the level of both communities and populations. An interdisciplinary team of microbiologists, ecologists, engineers, and limnologists will use a suite of molecular tools and genomics to investigate (1) Interactions between bacteria and phytoplankton in the surface layers of lakes; (2) Changes in microbial communities resulting from water column disturbances such as thermal stratification and seasonal mixing and (3) The role of evolutionary processes in shaping individual microbial populations within and among lakes. The results of this work will allow us to better explain and ultimately predict the composition and dynamics of microbial communities and populations in freshwater lakes.

This project will not only advance our understanding of the microbial ecology of humic lakes, but of microbial ecology and biodiversity in a broader context. The research approach is structured within an ecological framework and reflect urgent questions in the field of microbial biology. To enhance the broader impacts of the work, the investigators will engage in outreach activities coordinated with the following organizations; the NTL-LTER SchoolYard Science program which promotes inquiry-based learning through workshops for high-school teachers; the Center for Biology Education which is developing a virtual professional development resource for middle and high school science and mathematics teachers; the UW-Madison PEOPLE program which organizes summer courses for underrepresented high-school students; the NSF-funded Center for the Integration of Teaching, Research, and Learning which promotes professional development of graduate students, post-docs, and faculty. The research team will continue to leverage these existing programs to show the general public how freshwater microbes are key components of lake ecosystems, impacting water quality and nutrient cycling in profound ways.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is awarded a grant to upgrade the analytical capacity of the Trout Lake Station, a year-round biological field station operated by the Center for Limnology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with respect to water chemistry and radioisotope analysis by acquiring a gas chromatograph and a liquid scintillation counter. Discoveries of the past decade have substantially changed our views of lakes in landscape carbon cycles and fluxes of greenhouse gases. The equipment provided under this award will contribute to research in biogeochemistry, food web dynamics and microbial ecology leading to an understanding the roles of freshwater systems in landscape carbon cycles.

Located in the Northern Highland Lake District in northern Wisconsin, the station provides access to a wide variety of aquatic ecosystems and their surrounding landscapes. More than 2500 lakes are within 50km of the station. The station has a long history of aquatic research that has produced over 1000 publications to date, with 166 peer-reviewed publications and 21 graduate student theses in the past five years. In addition to fostering research, the Trout Lake Station is used regularly for field trips by undergraduate and graduate courses from universities throughout the Midwest.

Freshwaters are ecologically important and socially valued elements of landscapes and a nexus of hydrological, biogeochemical, biotic and human social interactions. The North Temperate Lakes Long-Term Ecological Research project has been operating since 1981 in lake districts of southern and northern Wisconsin. During that time it has amassed an impressive long-term data set and understanding of the ecology of lakes and also been a leader in developing concepts for use in long-term ecological research, such as ecosystem services and ecosystem resilience. This renewal proposal builds on 33 years of prior research to examine integrated socio-ecological dynamics in the two study areas, focusing on the ecological, climatological and social processes that affect lake districts and the interactions among these processes. Four interrelated questions guide the proposed research: How and why have lake districts changed, and how will they change in the future? What are the major ecological and social responses of lake districts to climate change? How do multiple interacting drivers affect regional change in lake districts at multiple scales? and What are the magnitudes, interactions, and potential future flows of ecosystem services in lake districts? A diverse group of natural, social, and information scientists will undertake the research.

New synthetic understandings of the causes and consequences of ecological and social-ecological change in lake districts will be produced relevant to decisions of individuals and institutions concerned with the future of the region and the welfare of its residents. Results are integrated in K-12, undergraduate, graduate and continuing education, and data will be available and provided to individuals, non-governmental organizations, local, state and federal agencies, and to assist in global assessments of environmental and ecological change.

The University of Wisconsin Trout Lake Station is awarded a grant to add a new conference room facility onto the existing main laboratory building. The 1500 square-foot wing will contain a 1050 sq. ft. multipurpose assembly room, restroom facilities, a kitchenette, and a multiple use basement. The assembly room will have a rated capacity of 70 people (chairs and tables) or 150 people (chairs only). This addition will allow the Trout Lake Station to host meetings, workshops, outreach events, and classes. Researchers at Trout Lake have been leaders in various regional, national, and international research groups including GLEON, NEON, and LTER. The new facility at Trout Lake will benefit these programs by providing adequate on site meeting space. The new addition will similarly enhance the Station's ability to conduct outreach activities for K-12 and the general public.

The Trout Lake Station benefits science and society by 1) creating new knowledge, including policy-relevant research such as that on long-term dynamics of lakes, impacts and removal of aquatic invasive species, and human-lake interactions, 2) providing opportunity and training for students, including more than 100 undergraduates spending significant time at the station (e.g., publication of 21 graduate student theses, and direct contact with more than 1250 elementary school students - including more than 200 Native Americans - since 2004) and 3) providing outreach to the general public, including community participation in developing scenarios of the future of the Northern Highland Lake District, presentations to community groups, and a strong presence in the local, state, and national print, radio, and television media. The addition of this new facility will allow the Station to continue to serve as a national and international resource for research and outreach on aquatic resources and their interactions with terrestrial systems and society.

Because climate and land use strongly affect ecosystems and the services that they provide to society, understanding of both individual factors and their interactions is integral for developing effective environmental management and policy. Cross-scale interactions, wherein a factor at one scale interacts with a factor at another scale, are of particular interest, given their complexity and lack of study. The main goal of this research is to develop tools to measure and understand how climate and land use, by themselves and as interacting factors, affect lake ecosystems across scales of time and space, even as these factors are themselves, changing. Lakes are unique study systems to address questions of cross-scale interactions; for example, agricultural land use in a surrounding lake watershed can interact with the climate of the region in which the lake is located, leading to situations where lakes in different climatic zones may respond differently to similar surrounding environmental inputs, such as nutrient inputs from agricultural land use in their watersheds. This project will identify and measure the most important cross-scale interactions that control lake nutrients and water quality and will be guided by a landscape limnology conceptual framework. A collaborative team from three universities will collect a large dataset on lakes, nutrients, and watersheds, including over 5,000 lake ecosystems in 11 U.S. states spanning up to 30 years. Several new and innovative statistical modeling approaches will be used to detect and model cross-scale interactions, including Bayesian hierarchical modeling (a statistical method for learning and modeling complex relationships in data).

Identifying the conditions or the environments prone to cross-scale interactions is needed to forecast, manage, and restore ecosystems, such as lakes, responding to change operating at local to regional scales. The research framework, design, and analysis of this work provide an innovative approach that has the potential change the conduct of research on large-scale, living systems, beyond the lakes under study. Additionally, because commonly-measured lake water quality variables used in water resource policy will be used in this analysis, results from this project will directly inform state and federal agencies responsible for lake and water management. Finally, several undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral researchers will be trained as a result, helping to foster a new generation of biologists with skills in tackling broad-scaled research and policy problems.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is awarded a grant that will allow its Trout Lake Station to purchase and deploy four fully-instrumented buoys (plus one spare) and associated telecommunication and data management equipment. The system is designed to allow year-round collection of high-frequency limnological data from four long-term study lakes. The data will be made publically available in near-real time. The Trout Lake Station is a year-round field station operated by the Center for Limnology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Located in the Northern Highland Lake District in northern Wisconsin, the Station has a long history of research on the region's aquatic resources dating back to the 1920s.

The instrumented buoys will make high-frequency measurements of weather (air temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind speed and direction, and precipitation), water temperature throughout the water column, and near-surface dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll a, phycocyanin, and colored dissolved organic matter. During the open water season the data will be telemetered to the Station in near real time, run through an automated range check and posted to a publically available database. The four lakes to be instrumented differ in their size, depth, trophic status, color, water chemistry, hydrology, and biotic communities. All are long-term study lakes of the North Temperate Lakes Long-Term Ecological Research program and have more than 30 years of comprehensive limnological data available. The lakes are within 10km of each other (and the Trout Lake Station), so data from the buoys will be used to compare differential responses of lakes to nearly identical weather conditions. Such comparisons are powerful in predicting climatic responses of lakes in general. The buoy data will be used by a myriad of researchers who require background environmental data for their research projects on the study lakes. In addition, the data will be used widely within the Global Lakes Ecological Observatory Network in comparative studies of lake processes worldwide.

The instrumented buoys resulting from this award will help create new knowledge that has societal relevance, provide research opportunities and training for students, and increase the scientific literacy and interest of the general public. The buoy data will be used to address the likely effect of climate change and variation on lakes and to provide environmental context for population-, community-, and ecosystem-level studies. Two summer research experiences for undergraduates will be provided by this award. Finally, the buoy data in public engagement activities including an annual Trout Lake Station open house and a very popular and well-attended Science on Tap-Minocqua series held at the local community microbrewery. For more information about Trout Lake Station visit the website at http://limnology.wisc.edu/Trout_Lake_Station.php.

Biologists have used a well accepted classification system to identify regional areas by the major or predominant vegetation biomes. This largely land-based classification system has been very useful in conducting research and understanding the environmental, geological, and biological features of those regions. These factors influence how ecological systems within the biome are structured and how they function. The classification scheme provides a framework for site- specific research to be understood in a larger regional context and scale the results to the larger region. A weakness or missing part of this framework is streams and rivers. Most maps or lists of biomes of the world would suggest that flowing waters are so similar to one another that all streams can be lumped into a single category. They are generally lumped together regardless of the regional geology, watershed vegetation, or climatic factors. This research will develop a biome classification system for streams to better understand how streams function and provide an ability to predict how streams will change from human and environmental factors.

This continental scale project will address the deceptively simple question: is there such a thing as a stream biome? From an ecosystem perspective we now know that inland waters play critical roles in both global carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycling. The physical diversity of lotic waters as well as their tendency is more temporally dynamic than terrestrial systems. Ultimately the phenology of stream ecosystem energetics will be a function of energy supply (light and fixed terrestrial carbon) and fixed carbon removal (via hydrologic disturbance). Watershed structure determines the route and rate at which water enters stream channels while watershed vegetation determines the magnitude and timing of fixed carbon inputs and the degree and temporal patterning of light availability. This research effort will increase the measurements of annual metabolism by nearly two orders of magnitude. At the present time there exist only two streams for which annual metabolic rates have been calculated using continuous dissolved oxygen measurements. By the conclusion of this project 55 years of high quality metabolism data will have been generated for a total of 35 streams, and the project PIs will have acquired (via leveraged funds and collaborations) metabolism data for at least 196 additional streams. Metabolism metrics from all of these streams will be used to build the first hierarchical classification of stream ecosystems based on their seasonal and annual patterns of primary productivity and ecosystem respiration. Stream biome delineation will facilitate estimation of stream metabolic rates at timescales of days to years for spatial scales from reaches to river networks. Simulation models, developed from first principles and refined with empirical data specific to each biome, will forecast changes in metabolic rates in response to likely climate and land use change scenarios. The data management plan has been designed in collaboration with informatics staff of the USGS Center for Integrated Data Analytics and USGS has agreed to host and help develop a public data repository, modeling, and data visualization platform specifically designed to collate long-term or high-resolution metabolism and dissolved oxygen datasets for streams. By building, refining and activating a community data platform this research program will change the way individual streams are studied and will facilitate and encourage near instantaneous cross-site synthesis. In addition to capacity building, this project will directly support seven graduate students and 7 postdoctoral associates over the funding period.

Lakes are recognized as hotspots for processing carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus and thus are critical for understanding how human activities affect global cycles of these essential nutrients. However, to estimate the total contribution of lakes in the United States to these global cycles, they have to rely on measurements from a small number of well-studied lakes because scientists do not have the resources to study every lake all the time. The resulting extrapolations to estimate global cycles and predict future change have many uncertainties. Consequently, it is important to understand where and when information from small subsets of lakes can be accurately applied to the wide variety of lake types and landscape settings across the continental United States. To improve future extrapolation efforts and to understand the role of lakes in global nutrient cycles, this award will build an unprecedented database that combines nutrient measurements from existing government and university monitoring programs (for about 15,000 lakes) with lake and landscape characteristics from national publicly-available digital maps for all lakes in the continental United States (about 130,000 lakes). Using this novel and unprecedented database, three components will be studied that are needed to determine the contribution of lakes to continental nutrient cycles. First, lake nutrients will be studied jointly rather than individually to provide insights into the conditions in which cycles are linked or not, which will help to reduce uncertainty in continental estimates of lake nutrients. Second, as scientists expand their studies from a few lakes to the entire continent, the relationships between lake nutrients and their landscape controls can differ in strength and even direction among different regions, further contributing to uncertainties in continental understanding of lake nutrient cycles. Finally, compiling data on every lake increases the chance of discovering novel environmental conditions that have not previously been studied, yet may play important roles in continental-scale nutrient cycles. Through these important research activities, scientists will increase their confidence in estimating the effects of lakes on global cycles. This award contributes to the broader scientific community because the database will be made publicly-available in a timely manner to complement the National Ecological Observatory program and to developing open-source advanced computer tools for analyzing large datasets for this and other big-data studies. In addition, the diverse team (by gender, career-level, and discipline) will train and mentor early-career scientists in interdisciplinary, team-based, and data-intensive science to be leaders in addressing challenging questions such as how future land use intensification and changes in global climate will affect lakes and the services they provide.

Ecosystems, such as lakes, are complex, heterogeneous, and strongly influenced by their ecological context?environmental or anthropogenic factors that operate at multiple scales. This complexity makes extrapolating site-level estimates of ecological services, state, and function challenging. The overarching goal of this research is to understand and predict patterns in the three major nutrients for all continental US lakes to inform estimates of lake contributions to continental and global cycles of nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon. The proposed work will address three important phenomena that limit scientists? ability to extrapolate freshwater nutrients at continental scales. (1) Because cycles of nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon in inland water interact with each other and are often affected by similar controls, they should be considered as linked, not isolated. (2) As studies expand to view the whole continent, interactions between driver variables at different scales (cross-scale interactions) also increase. (3) A hallmark of the Anthropocene is the rise of novelty in ecosystems--new environmental conditions or new combinations of conditions. Such novelty may confound extrapolation in unknown ways. The proposed research is an unprecedented effort that will: address these important phenomena, develop new continental-scale data products for aquatic macrosystems ecology, and contribute novel, data-intensive analytical methods from computer science and statistics. This award will answer five research questions related to the above phenomena using two approaches. First, funds will be used to build a large, integrated database of all lakes in the continental United States (called LAGOS-US) that includes measures of in situ nutrients collected from tens of thousands of lakes, and ecological-context metrics calculated for all 130,000 continental lakes using geographic information systems and remote sensing datasets. Second, analyses of the database will be conducted for each research question using existing and novel statistical and computer science analytical tools to improve macrosystems ecology knowledge of freshwater nutrients. This award will complement the National Ecological Observatory strengths by providing data for a broader range of aquatic ecosystems and by providing the ecological context for the six continental Observatory lake sites. This award will result in four major intellectual contributions to macrosystems ecology. (1) The identification of regions where coupling and decoupling of nutrients occur, leading to a more comprehensive understanding of relationships between ecological context drivers and linked nutrient cycles. (2) Increased understanding of the types and spatial structure of ecological contexts that are more likely to lead to cross-scale interactions. (3) The identification of the role that novelty in ecological context plays in continental-scale predictions. (4) The transformation of understanding of the ecological contexts that influence biogeochemical cycles at macroscales and lake contributions to these cycles. Given the likely prevalence of such phenomena in other macrosystems, the results will be transferable to other ecosystem types, and more broadly to macrosystems ecology.