Projects with either active funding or recently active funding:
- Urban Physiological Ecology
- USDA Climatic Sensitivity of Urban Bees. In collaboration with Drs. Elsa Youngsteadt and Clint Penick, we have been connecting bee physiology to their health, abundance, and pollination, with urban warming in 10 US cities, assessing their vulnerability to urban climate change. Uniquely, we are investigating both thermal AND desiccation tolerance, along with field body temperature and water content, allowing calculation of bee safety margins.
- Wetland Ecology
- H2Ohio Wetland Monitoring. Our lab works collaboratively with Drs. Helen Michaels and Sarah Emery to monitor wetland plant community composition and above and below ground biomass and nutrient content, estimating size of the plant nutrient pool each year, at multiple H2Ohio wetlands. We also work more broadly with scientists at multiple universities to estimate annual nutrient retention, examining which wetlands are more or less effective at preventing nutrient runoff, and providing management recommendations to improve nutrient retention.
- HABRI Wetland Plant Traits and Nutrient Function. Working collaboratively with Drs. Helen Michaels and Steve Hovick, our team is examining how different plant traits (e.g. stem density, SLA) influence nutrient cycling in multiple ways, including sedimentation, nutrient uptake, and decomposition.
- ODNR Wetland Dredged Material Amendment. In collaboration with Drs. Angelica Vazquez-Ortega, Chris Ward, Helen Michaels, and Sarah Emery, we are assessing how amending new wetland restorations with material dredged from Maumee Bay influences establishment of plants and microbial communities.
- NSF Great Plains Ephemeral Wetland Macrosystem. This recently completed project examined connections between populations and communities of freshwater crustaceans (e.g. fairy shrimp) across the US Great Plains.
- Soil Health and Water Quality
- USDA Pilot Watershed. In close collaboration with Drs. Angelica Vazquez-Ortega and Michael Weintraub, we are using a variety of basic and advanced techniques to assess the impact of agricultural best management practices on soil health. Our lab focuses on the use of stable isotopes to examine phosphate sources and cycling. Our soil health team is part of a larger team, also monitoring water quality, with the goal of achieving 70% adoption of Best Management Practices in one watershed, which can then be compared to others. The overall project is led by Dr. Jay Martin.
- Emerging Contaminants and Stream Food Webs
- NOAA Sea Grant Understanding Spatiotemporal Variation in Contaminants. This recently completed project focused on measuring concentrations of a suite of emerging contaminants, including psychoactive substances like cocaine and fentanyl, in wastewater influent, effluent, stream water, and emergent insects.