Food Web Ecology Lab: Con"grad"ulations to the special topics students of 2008!

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.

Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Con"grad"ulations to the special topics students of 2008!

This year has been a whirlwind of fabulous student projects. Thanks to all of you who participated in the lab and for the great work that came out of it!

Greg (aka Matt, the skipper) Lynch looked at seasonal variation in patterns of community composition of temperate rock pools...

Kate MacPhee tackled community abundance patterns in Arctic rock pools...

William (aka Mather) Carscallen got webby in the Arctic and Antarctic assembling marine coastal food-webs (the Antarctic ones have more species by the way...can anyone say fishing pressure?)

Alyssa Byers-Heinlein revealed the hierarchical nature of the human food web anticipating with considerable foresight a new study from SFI researcher Mark Newman and colleagues on the hierarchical nature of networks...