Society for Freshwater Science Conference in Florida

The St. Kate's Crew at the Society for Freshwater Science conference - left
to right - Paula Furey, Delor Sander (standing), Jill Welter, and Anika Bratt

In late May, we traveled to Jacksonville, Florida to present the first results from our collaboration in Iceland to the scientific community.  Overall, the Iceland project group gave six presentations, including three from those of us representing St. Kate's.    A fourth presentation also focused on nitrogen fixation was given by a recent St. Kate's alumna - Anika Bratt who is now a Ph.D. student and continues to study nitrogen fixation in the Eel River in California with Jill Welter and Paula Furey as collaborators, as Anika has been following up on some research questions she developed as an undergraduate student at SCU.   All of the group's presentations were well-received and we gained a great deal from our conversations with colleagues in the field, as well as a chance to meet up with our project collaborators and spend more time exploring our collective findings.  Delor gave a presentation focused on a comparison of two of the methods we used to measure nitrogen fixation in Iceland last summer and all reports indicate that she did an outstanding job and took advantage of the opportunity to talk one-on-one with other key scientists who are using similar approaches.  They expressed great interest in our data and initial results  - a great way to lead into our upcoming field season in Iceland which will give us the opportunity to follow up on the feedback we received at the conference. Here is a list of presentations given by our project group:

Delor presenting her poster at SFS - pictured here with
J.S. Ólafsson and G.M. Gíslason - our collaborators from Iceland,
and Jim Hood from Montana State U. (left to right).

Delor Sander et al. "Predicting effects of climate warming on N2-fixation and its ecological consequences in aquatic ecosystems:  a comparison of acetylene reduction and 15N2 isotopic methods"

Jill Welter et al. - "Effect of temperature on N2-fixation rates and N2-fixer species assemblages in streams in the Hengill region of Iceland"

Paula Furey et al. - "Composition and abundance of nitrogen-fixing algal assemblages in nitrogen-limited streams along a geothermal gradient in the Hengill region of Iceland"

Jim Hood et al. - "Patterns of nitrogen and phosphorus uptake across a thermal gradient of subarctic streams"

Jim Junker et al. - "Patterns of epilithic CNP stoichiometry across a natural temperature gradient in Icelandic streams"

Dan Nelson et al. - "Experimental whole-stream warming increases algal standing crop but reduces consumer biomass"