Steve Blumenshine |
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| My research interests tend
toward the interface of aquatic communities and ecosystems. Within this focus is an
emphasis on how human impacts such as nutrient loading and fish management affect the
structure and function of food webs, and the consequences for ecosystem processes. I've
particularly been interested in how these perturbations affect energy and carbon flow
through food webs. So far my research has been conducted in several aquatic ecosystem types and spanned broad scales. Thus, I'm drawn to questions regarding how scale, experimental design, and sampling strategy interact to affect the interpretation of mechanisms operating within ecosystems. Understanding and testing ecological mechanisms that produce patterns in large aquatic systems is often difficult. However, information from monitoring programs, smaller ecosystems amenable to manipulation, natural experiments, or portions of systems isolated in containers for short-term experiments provide valuable lessons. I'm particularly interested in comparisons of the structure and dynamics of communities and ecosystems in different habitat types, and consequently how responses to human impacts may differ among ecosystems (e.g. streams, lakes, estuaries). I am also interested in applying combinations of techniques to questions in unique ways. My research approaches include experiments and quantitative analyses using mesocosms, stable isotopes, fish bioenergetics, statistical and simulation models, food web models, and databases in a collaborative framework. |
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