Aquatic Food Web Ecology Lab, Dalhousie University

Research in the Aquatic Food Web Ecology Lab based at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, focuses on the consequences of biodiversity loss to the functioning and stability of aquatic food webs. All of our work is done in a food web context, which means that its not just the numbers of species that we are interested in, but also the structure of the food webs in which those species are embedded. Most of our work is done in aquatic microcosms, small container ecosystems in which we can assemble food webs and then subject them to various types of disturbance regimes . We also use mathematical models to run "in silico" experiments, otherwise known as computer simulations, to study problems that are too complex or just not possible to conduct in natural systems.

Thursday, May 31, 2007

Check out the article in Conservation in Practice on Virtual Ecosystems


Virtual Ecology
Posted by at 1 comment:

The Human Food Web Project


















Many thanks to the four first year DISPers (Sarah Creaser, Joanna McNeil, Neil Jackson, and Ingen-Catherine Mueller, Dalhousie Integrated Science Program) who participated in a new research project in the foodweblab to assemble a "Human Food Web". Many thanks to second year volunteer Alyssa Byers-Heinlein who helped supervise this pilot study.
Posted by at No comments:

Niche model featured in Mathematics of Networks Poster!

Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Summer field work

This is a really exciting summer for us at the foodweb lab.
We headed down to Jamaica last month (in April) to collect some tropical rock pool beasties,
and now we are focusing our attention on the meiofaunal communities in Arctic rock pools (up in Churchill, MA) and local supralittoral rock pool communities in Nova Scotia. We have got some great cultures going from Jamaica and this month we will also be starting some experiments with Brian Starzomski, Marta Coll, and Heike Lotze testing some "fishing down the food web" predictions.
Posted by at No comments:

Congradulations to the honors students of 2007!!!

Constance Tuck and Laura Argument successfully completed their honors thesis projects. Congrats to both of you.

Constance Tuck "Food-web structure of mangrove islands and the theory of island biogeography"










Laura Argument "Why Zooplankton don't eat Great White Sharks: the relationship between body size and trophic position in fishes"

Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)