NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2014

Kordas Rebecca L, Richmond

Investigators

Abstract

NSF Postdoctoral Fellowships in Biology combine research and training components to prepare young scientists for careers in biology and provide them an opportunity to establish international collaborations and take advantage of research facilities and opportunities abroad. Forging strong international collaborations is mutually beneficial to the U.S. and the foreign hosts. This fellowship to Rebecca Kordas supports research and training to explore temperature and predation on food web structure in natural streams. The host institution for this fellowship is Imperial College London, and the sponsoring scientist is Dr. Guy Woodward. Field work is being conducted in Iceland. Mathematical models integrating physical and biological parameters are being developed and promise to be useful for predicting future environmental change. The fellowship provides training in the development of model development and novel data analysis techniques and is being funded by the Office of International and Integrative Activities and the Directorate for Biological Sciences. Icelandic geothermally heated streams provide a realistic field representation of future warming regimes on earth. One warm and one cold food web have been previously described in the Hengill catchment but generalizations from these studies are limited due to the presence of an apex predator in the warm stream, confounding this natural experiment. The objective of this research is to disentangle the relative contributions of warming, an abiotic factor, and trout predation, a biotic one, to food web structure and thus elucidate the direct and indirect effects of warming on food webs. This is being achieved via two complementary field experiments. First, trout are being excluded from warm streams and the resulting food web compared to that from upstream regions where trout remain. Second, food webs are being assembled from a factorial combination of warm/cool, predator-free/predator-rich streams, in the Hengill system and an undescribed trout-free geothermal system (Torfajokull).