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.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Murphy and Carscallen cleaning up!

Congratulations to Grace Murphy who was awarded an NSERC scholarship for her PhD research on the effects of anthropogenic disturbances on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and to PhD student Mather Carscallen who won the InnovaCorp Clean Tech Open .
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Lab at Bioball 2012

I was there in spirit (and on the placard) at least....food-web ecologists rocking it out at the annual biology dinner/dance
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Binary versus flow-based webs

Estimating trophic position in marine and estuarine food webs -- EcoSphere Binary approaches to assembling feeding links are often criticized as being less powerful and accurate than flow-based methods. Our results show a high concordance between binary and d15N estimates of trophic position as well as showing that in some cases binary estimates are better predictors of d15N than flow-based estimates, reaffirming the robustness of the structural approach to assembling food webs.
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Polar food-webs

Do Arctic and Antarctic sea-ice food webs differ in structure and robustness to species loss? Find out in "Structure and robustness to species loss in Arctic and Antarctic ice-shelf meta-ecosystem webs" published online in Ecological Modeling.
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Summer 2012

So much going on this summer. Mather Carscallen is heading out to Germany to work with Ulrich Brose and Amrei Binzer on the Allometric Trophic Model. Tamara Romanuk is giving a CSEE symposium talk at Evolution 2012 in Ottawa "Species Invasions in Complex Food Web Networks". We are also heading out to GlobalWeb II in Barcelona in July organized by Ross Thompson.
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