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Welcome to the Aquatic Ecology Lab at RIT!

Our research concerns the interaction between aquatic organisms and their biological and physico-chemical environment.  Past projects have evaluated a variety of primary producer functional types, including native and invasive wetland plants, benthic microalgae and nuisance macroalgae.  Our work takes a two-pronged approach towards the interplay between organisms and their environment.  The first asks how environmental factors control distribution and abundance; the second asks how these organisms alter local conditions, and thereby influence microbial processes and organisms at higher trophic levels.  More recently, we are investigating the linkages, direct and indirect, among biodiversity (primarily of invertebrates), plant productivity, and biogeochemical processes.  This new line of research crosses the boundaries between ecosystem and community ecology.

As a result of increasing human populations in the coastal zone, land-margin ecosystems are among the most heavily impacted ecosystems on Earth; human-associated pollution, destruction, and introduction of non-native species cause drastic perturbations from steady-state ecosystem structure and function.  Understanding how aquatic organisms respond to, or create, perturbation and thereby affect biogeochemical cycling, water quality and higher trophic levels, is imperative to predicting future changes and dictating appropriate management strategies.