Sarah Collins

University of Wyoming | UW · Department of Zoology and Physiology

Abstract Multiple studies have reported widespread browning of Northern Hemisphere lakes. Most examples are from boreal lakes that have experienced limited human influence, and browning has alternatively been attributed to changes in atmospheric deposition, climate, and land use. To determine the extent and possible causes of browning across a more...

Understanding how nutrients flow through food webs is central in ecosystem ecology. Tracer addition experiments are powerful tools to reconstruct nutrient flows by adding an isotopically enriched element into an ecosystem and tracking its fate through time. Historically, the design and analysis of tracer studies have varied widely, ranging from des...

There are multiple protocols for determining total nitrogen (TN) in water, but most can be grouped into direct approaches (TN‐d) that convert N forms to nitrogen‐oxides (NOx) and combined approaches (TN‐c) that combine Kjeldahl N (organic N +NH3) and nitrite+nitrate (NO2+NO3‐N). TN concentrations from these two approaches are routinely treated as e...

Although spatial and temporal variation in ecological properties has been well‐studied, crucial knowledge gaps remain for studies conducted at macroscales and for ecosystem properties related to material and energy. We test four propositions of spatial and temporal variation in ecosystem properties within a macroscale (1000 km's) extent. We fit Bay...

Regionalization is the task of dividing up a landscape into homogeneous patches with similar properties. Although this task has a wide range of applications, it has two notable challenges. First, it is assumed that the resulting regions are both homogeneous and spatially contiguous. Second, it is well-recognized that landscapes are hierarchical suc...

Climate change can have strong effects on aquatic ecosystems, including disrupting nutrient cycling and mediating processes that affect primary production. Past studies have been conducted mostly on individual or small groups of ecosystems, making it challenging to predict how future climate change will affect water quality at broad scales. We used...

Growth of macroscale limnological research has been accompanied by an increase in secondary datasets compiled from multiple sources. We examined patterns of data availability in LAGOS‐NE, a dataset derived from 87 sources, to identify biases in availability of lake water quality data and to consider how such biases might affect perceived patterns a...

Climate change is a well‐recognized threat to lake ecosystems and, although there likely exists geographic variation in the sensitivity of lakes to climate, broad‐scale, long‐term studies are needed to understand this variation. Further, the potential mediating role of local to regional ecological context on these responses is not well documented....

Aim We aimed to measure the dominant spatial patterns in ecosystem properties (such as nutrients and measures of primary production) and the multi‐scaled geographical driver variables of these properties and to quantify how the spatial structure of pattern in all of these variables influences the strength of relationships among them. Location and...

Ratios Matter is entering its second year with our first issue being published about one year ago. We would like to thank everyone who has supported Ratios Matter over the past year. Our goal for the upcoming year is to continue being a source of ecological stoichiometry news both by highlighting new work and by providing insightful commentary on t...

Background Understanding the factors that affect water quality and the ecological services provided by freshwater ecosystems is an urgent global environmental issue. Predicting how water quality will respond to global changes not only requires water quality data, but also information about the ecological context of individual water bodies across br...

Studies of trophic-level material and energy transfers are central to ecology. The use of isotopic tracers has now made it possible to measure trophic transfer efficiencies of important nutrients and to better understand how these materials move through food webs. We analyzed data from thirteen (15) N-ammonium tracer addition experiments to quantif...

Headwater streams remove, transform, and store inorganic nitrogen (N) delivered from surrounding watersheds, but excessive N inputs from human activity can saturate removal capacity. Most research has focused on quantifying N removal from the water column over short periods and in individual reaches, and these ecosystem-scale measurements suggest t...

The United States (U.S.) has faced major environmental changes in recent decades, including agricultural intensification and urban expansion, as well as changes in atmospheric deposition and climate—all of which may influence eutrophication of freshwaters. However, it is unclear whether or how water quality in lakes across diverse ecological settin...

Production in many ecosystems is co-limited by multiple elements. While a known suite of drivers associated with nutrient sources, nutrient transport, and internal processing controls concentrations of phosphorus (P) and nitrogen (N) in lakes, much less is known about whether the drivers of single nutrient concentrations can also explain spatial or...

Understanding broad-scale ecological patterns and processes often involves accounting for regional-scale heterogeneity. A common way to do so is to include ecological regions in sampling schemes and empirical models. However, most existing ecological regions were developed for specific purposes, using a limited set of geospatial features and irrepr...

Understanding the broad-scale response of lake CO2 dynamics to global change is challenging because the relative importance of different controls of surface water CO2 are not known across broad geographic extents. Using geostatistical analyses of 1080 lakes in the conterminous United States, we found that lake partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2) was con...

This is the inaugural issue of Ratios Matter, a newsletter all about ecological stoichiometry and elemental ratios. Here you will find stoichiometric news including announcements of upcoming events and summaries of recent publications. Anything might show up in the pages of Ratios Matter that is of interest to the stoichiometrist at large. Send us...

Colimitation of primary production is increasingly recognized as a dominant process across aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. In streams, both nutrient availability and light availability have been shown to independently limit primary production, but colimitation by both light and nutrients is rarely considered. We used a series of nutrient-diffus...

Decades of ecological study have demonstrated the importance of top-down and bottom-up controls on food webs, yet few studies within this context have quantified the magnitude of energy and material fluxes at the whole-ecosystem scale. We examined top-down and bottom-up effects on food web fluxes using a field experiment that manipulated the presen...

Many ecosystems rely on subsidies of carbon and nutrients from surrounding environments. In headwater streams that are heavily shaded by riparian forests, allochthonous inputs from terrestrial systems often comprise a major part of the organic matter budget. Bacteria play a key role in organic matter cycling in streams, but there is limited evidenc...

Cross system subsidies of energy and materials can be a substantial fraction of food web fluxes in ecosystems, especially when autochthonous production is strongly limited by light or nutrients. We explored whether assimilation of terrestrial energy varied in specific consumer taxa collected from streams of different sizes and resource availabiliti...

Although there are considerable site-based data for individual or groups of ecosystems, these datasets are widely scattered, have different data formats and conventions, and often have limited accessibility. At the broader scale, national datasets exist for a large number of geospatial features of land, water, and air that are needed to fully under...

Analyses of 21 N-15 stable isotope tracer experiments, designed to examine food web dynamics in streams around the world, indicated that the isotopic composition of food resources assimilated by primary consumers (mostly invertebrates) poorly reflected the presumed food sources. Modeling indicated that consumers assimilated only 33-50% of the N ava...

Developing conservation strategies for migratory fishes requires an understanding of connectivity among populations. Neotropical rivers contain diverse and economically important assemblages of migratory fishes, but little is known about the population biology of most species. We examined the population structure of Prochilodus mariae, an abundant...

Background/Question/Methods In streams, organic matter sources include both autochthonous carbon, which is fixed in the stream by autotrophs, and allochthonous carbon, which is fixed terrestrially and enters the stream as detritus. Bacteria play an important role in the processing of allochthonous carbon. Because few trophic transfers occur betwe...

This article documents the addition of 112 microsatellite marker loci and 24 pairs of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) sequencing primers to the Molecular Ecology Resources Database. Loci were developed for the following species: Agelaius phoeniceus, Austrolittorina cincta, Circus cyaneus, Circus macrourus, Circus pygargus, Cryptocoryne × purpu...

Anthropogenic environmental changes, including overfishing, hydrologic alteration, and habitat degradation, pose substantial threats to riverine fish populations and their migration routes. Neotropical rivers contain a diverse assemblage of economically important migratory fishes, but relatively little is known about their population biology compar...

Nutrient limitation plays an important role in shaping community structure and ecosystem processes in aquatic environments. Many types of nutrient diffusing substrata (NDS) have been used to estimate nutrient limitation in lotic systems. However, whether these various NDS methods produce comparable results is unknown. We evaluated the 3 most common...

Diel migration is a common predator avoidance mechanism commonly found in temperate water bodies and increasingly in tropical systems. Previous research with only single day and night samples suggested that the endemic shrimp, Halocaridina rubra, may exhibit diel migration in Hawaiian anchialine pools to avoid predation by introduced mosquito fish,...

This article documents the addition of 112 microsatellite marker loci and 24 pairs of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) sequencing primers to the Molecular Ecology Resources Database. Loci were developed for the following species: Agelaius phoeniceus, Austrolittorina cincta, Circus cyaneus, Circus macrourus, Circus pygargus, Cryptocoryne × purpu...

This article documents the addition of 112 microsatellite marker loci and 24 pairs of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) sequencing primers to the Molecular Ecology Resources Database. Loci were developed for the following species: Agelaius phoeniceus, Austrolittorina cincta, Circus cyaneus, Circus macrourus, Circus pygargus, Cryptocoryne · purpu...