Symposium: Utility of Museum Collections IIRoom: Ballroom 111B2022-07-31 10:00 - 11:30 |
| Moderator: Tom Turner |
|
1. 10:00 Using Stable Isotope Analysis and Museum Collections to Examine Effects of Flow-Regime Change Across Large Spatial and Temporal Scales. Allison Pease*, University of Missouri; Krista Capps, University of Georgia pease.allison@gmail.com
Anthropogenic flow alteration has profoundly influenced freshwater ecosystems over the last several decades. Oftentimes these impacts are manifested in reduced diversity of fish communities and changes in the availability and quality of food resources that support fish production. Though challenging, investigations at broad spatial scales and across decades are ideal for elucidating such effects. Large-scale spatial comparisons potentially allow for comparisons of systems across a range of environmental characteristics, including differing levels of human alteration. Analyses across multi-decadal time scales are necessary to investigate stressors that have time-lagged or gradual ecological responses (e.g., groundwater withdrawals) and to examine major drivers of change that occurred historically (e.g., dam construction). Recently, some studies have shown that carrying out stable isotope analysis (SIA) on museum-preserved fish specimens provides an opportunity to identify impacts of watershed-level habitat alteration on aquatic ecosystems over very broad time scales. These studies suggest that retrospective SIA using museum-preserved specimens can reveal long-term effects on energy inputs and trophic diversity of aquatic consumers following changes in ecosystem size, complexity, and productivity caused by flow alteration. A critical next step in advancing this line of inquiry will be comparing long-term responses across a broader array of river systems, spanning different biomes and continents. |
|
2. 10:15 Fish Collections, Isotope Data, and Linked Environmental Data from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). Paula Mabee*, Battelle, National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) mabee@battelleecology.org
The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a continental-scale Observatory, operated by Battelle for the National Science Foundation, and designed to collect standardized, long-term, open access ecological data, specimens, and samples to better understand how U.S. ecosystems are changing. Understanding long-term ecosystem change through studies of fish community changes and stable isotopes analysis can be extended through NEON data. Fish voucher specimens and fin-clips are collected by NEON field staff at 34 aquatic locations across the U.S., including Alaska and Puerto Rico. Specimens and are held in the NEON Biorepository at Arizona State University and genetic data and fish images served through BOLD. Over its 30-year period, 100,000 biological, genomic, isotopic, and geological samples and specimens will be ingested by the NEON Biorepository annually, for a total of over 3 million samples of 70 different types related to 182 NEON data products. NEON specimens and samples are ‘born digital’ in an extended web of data that includes a rich set of environmental data and collected through highly coordinated efforts of humans and technology. Developed using over 11,000 sensors in diverse instruments including lidar, imaging spectrometers, phenocams, soil moisture sensors, flux towers, and aquatic buoy mounted water quality sensors, NEON’s related environmental data products capture atmospheric dynamics, biogeochemistry, ecohydrology, land cover and processes and are connected to the fish collections. The NEON Assignable Asset program is available to PIs and students for additional specimen collection at NEON sites. NEON welcomes participation in its advisory Fish Technical Working Group. |
|
3. 10:30 Prediction of Water Availability with the WRF-Hydro Community Modeling System and Potential Applications in Water Management for Aquatic Ecosystem Health. Aubrey Dugger*, National Center for Atmospheric Research; David Yates, National Center for Atmospheric Research; Tom Enzminger, National Center for Atmospheric Research; Nina Omani, National Center for Atmospheric Research adugger@ucar.edu
Water availability for human and ecosystem uses is dependent on quantity as well as quality, and water management strategies emphasizing both components are growing more common. As our hydrologic forecasting models have rapidly matured in their ability to accurately estimate water and energy fluxes over a range of environments and scales, a natural evolution is to extend these models for process-based water quality prediction. The NCAR WRF-Hydro community hydrologic modeling system (WRF-Hydro) provides a platform to jointly simulate large-scale land surface dynamics and hydrological routing. A new development effort is underway to build water temperature prediction capability into the WRF-Hydro modeling system, specifically targeting water temperature estimation for land surface components (snowmelt, soil water, groundwater), lateral surface and subsurface water movement, and blending of these sources within lakes and stream channels. Here, we present results from the first phase of this work – model development, implementation over a set of pilot basins across the U.S. spanning different hydro-climatic regimes, and model evaluation. We compare model estimates against in-situ observations (USGS water temperature gages, lake temperature gages) and report on sensitivity to model parameters. This new capability opens up opportunities to leverage existing real-time hydrological model capabilities (e.g., the NOAA National Water Model, built on WRF-Hydro) to provide U.S. water managers critical real-time information on water temperature in their local systems to better plan for and mitigate human and ecosystem stressors. |
|
4. 10:45 Leveraging Museum-Preserved Fishes for Understanding Spatiotemporal Changes in Mercury Sources to Aquatic Ecosystems. Casey Dillman*, Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates; Ryan Lepak, U.S. EPA Office of Research and Development; Sarah Janssen, U.S. Geological Survey; Joel Hoffman, U.S. EPA Office of Research and Development; Michael Tate, U.S. Geological Survey; Jacob Ogorek, U.S. Geological Survey; Christopher Yarnes, UC Davis Stable Isotope Lab; Peter McIntyre, Cornell University lepak.ryan@epa.gov
Remarkable archives of biota are preserved in natural history museums across the globe. These collections can aid the challenge of sampling remote aquatic ecosystems yet have never been used for large-scale assessment of mercury contamination. Using biota rather than sediment cores to infer temporal shifts in mercury bioaccumulation will sidestep assumptions about bioavailability that have complicated previous approaches. Previously, methylmercury concentrations in museum bird feathers have allowed us to reconstruct historical mercury burden to birds. Fishes are the prized sentinel to tracking shifts in mercury dynamics but because they are liquid preserved, making similar reconstructions is challenging. While we haven’t fully resolved how preservation and curation protocols impact mercury concentrations in fishes, we have developed a method that allows us to measure mercury stable isotopes in museum preserved fishes and thus infer mercury sources to these ecosystems. Here, we briefly describe this approach and then discuss its application in tropical central Africa from 1900 to present. With this new approach we hope to disentangle the changes in mercury sources to fishes as the region has diversified economically and in its resource exploitation. This will aid in better establishing baselines and predicting the impact of future changes at varying scales (e.g., climate, continued exploitation). |
|
5. 11:00 Reconstructing Mercury Trends in Great Lakes Gamefish That Are Complicated by Physical, Biological and Chemical Stressors. Ryan Lepak*, U.S. EPA Office of Research and Development; Joel Hoffman, U.S. EPA Office of Research and Development; Sarah Janssen, U.S. Geological Survey; Jacob Ogorek, U.S. Geological Survey; Michael Tate, U.S. Geological Survey; Tylor Rosera, U.S. Geological Survey; Morgann Gordon, Oak Ridge Associated Universities; Christopher Yarnes, UC Davis Stable Isotope Lab lepak.ryan@epa.gov
Despite dramatic declines in domestic mercury emissions and the contemporaneous declines in atmospheric mercury concentrations, mercury-fish consumption advisories persist nationally (and some are worsening). This is true even in the Laurentian Great Lakes where mercury concentrations in water are extremely low, rivaling the open ocean. The drivers that decouple reduced mercury emissions from our expected monotonic declines in fish mercury burden are multidimensional (e.g., climate change, invasive species) and often not directly obvious (e.g., bottom-up perturbations, complex physicochemical interactions). These complications dampen our ability to assess the impact of the Minamata Convention, the global nations’ response to curb mercury use, in the U.S. We’ve built an interdisciplinary team of scientists who are equipped to assess the in situ and ex situ controls influencing ecosystem response to complex and continuously changing ecosystems, mercury sources and mercury burdens so that we can better account for the uncertainties that make trend analyses a challenge and future projections, weakened. Here we discuss how new tools in isotope ecology are helping us better understand mercury data on fish from U.S. EPA’s Great Lakes Fish Monitoring and Surveillance Program, which spans nearly 40 years and all five Laurentian Great Lakes. |
|
6. 11:15 Discussion |