Stream light availability is an important factor influencing aquatic food webs. In forested headwaters, stream algal production is often highly light-limited, so an increase in light enhances benthic algal growth, which in turn increases food availability for primary consumers in the stream. In forested headwater streams, light availability is almost...
Geographic information systems (GISs) offer a useful tool for educators to teach students about local and global communities in various subjects. GISs are increasingly being used in K-12 education, but that growth is hindered due to many teachers’ limited access to time or resources necessary to adequately learn a GIS...
Across much of North America, legacies of historic and contemporary timber harvest have created a landscape dominated by regenerating forest stands in the early to middle stages of development. Most streamside forests are currently in the stem-exclusion phase of stand development and these closed canopies shade the forest understory and...
Riparian zones are ecotones between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Processes in streams are strongly influenced by riparian forest communities, age, stage and structure. Temperate forests across much of North America, including riparian areas, are recovering from historic land clearing with many stands in the stem-exclusion phase of development in which...
A central theme of ecology is determining factors that influence species distributions. Within aquatic ecology, species present in flowing waters are primarily influenced by the natural flow patterns of the stream (natural flow regime paradigm) while explanations of species present in standing waters are further divided by habitat type. To...
Riparian forests provide a myriad of ecosystem functions for adjacent streams and rivers, and due to these linkages, changes in riparian forest conditions can have direct implications for stream ecosystems. Resource managers in the coast redwood forests (Sequoia sempervirens) of northern California (USA) are actively thinning second-growth stands to accelerate...
A central challenge for ecology is to understand the dynamic nature of species interactions. A classic approach to community ecology assumes that individuals within a species are functionally identical and that consumer-resource dynamics can be predicted solely by using species abundances. However, one species can consist of multiple functional groups,...