Extreme habitats topic of Minshall Lecture Series in Ecology on April 12 at Idaho State University

Noted freshwater ecologist Alex Huryn, from the University of Alabama Department of Biological Sciences, will deliver the fifth annual G.W. Minshall Lecture Series in Ecology at 4 p.m. April 12.

He will deliver the lecture "Postcards for the edge; extreme habitats as tools for ecological inquiry" in Room 10 of the ISU Department of Biological Sciences Lecture Center.

Huryn has a strong interest in how local, landscape, and regional factors affect the structure and productivity of freshwater communities, stream communities in particular. Over the past few decades, he has been involved in a number of collaborative studies addressing the relationship between ecosystem productivity and geomorphology, regional geology, invasive species, amphibian declines, river-floodplain linkages, regional nitrogen deposition, and climate change.

He has worked intensively in stream and river systems in southeastern Ohio, western North Carolina, northern and central Alabama, Maine, the North Slope of Alaska, the South Island of New Zealand, Panama and Iceland. His work has focused on a diverse set of stream types including intermittent headwater streams, arctic springs, geothermal springs, cave streams, tropical streams and river-floodplain complexes.

His research projects, although diverse, have been consistent in their focus on gaining understanding of processes controlling primary and secondary productivity. Within the past decade, he has become increasingly focused on answering questions about how food-web structure and landscape templates interact to control stream ecosystem productivity. Arctic streams have simple food webs that respond strongly to landscape variables. This makes them particularly amenable to studies of landscape control of productivity.

Huryn’s presentation is sponsored by the ISU Department of Biological Sciences, which established the G.W. Minshall Lecture Series in Ecology to provide lasting recognition of the scientific contributions of Dr. Wayne Minshall, an ISU professor emeritus who has been an international leader in the study of streams and rivers.

For more information contact Ryan Blackadar at blacrya2@isu.edu.

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