Auckland Freshwater Ecosystems Lab

24/11/2022

Often streams are damaged during development and this is allowed to be 'offset' by 'restoring' other streams. Does it actually work? Check out Chloe's paper from her Masters research to find out. (spoiler alert - it's not good news for our streams...) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00288330.2022.2147201 School of Environment, The University of Auckland Faculty of Science, University of Auckland

‘Biodiversity offsetting’ aims to address the residual negative environmental impacts of human development. It’s goal is to achieve No Net Loss (NNL), and preferably a Net Gain of biodiversity attr...

20/11/2022

The shapes of river networks influences ecological response to river fragmentation by things like dams. New paper out by Finnbar Lee https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.4286 School of Environment, The University of Auckland Faculty of Science, University of Auckland

Changes in connectivity regimes affect patterns of diversity and species richness. In riverine ecosystems, factors that vary through space and time, such as flow, the presence of barriers to movement...

15/11/2022

Rose Gregersen describes a 500 year history of Lake Rototoa in her new paper https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.2c06835 School of Environment, The University of Auckland Faculty of Science, University of Auckland Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment

Interactions among multiple stressors, legacies of past perturbations, and the lack of historical information make it difficult to determine the influence of individual anthropogenic impacts on lakes and separate them from natural ecosystem variability. In the present study, we coupled paleolimnolog...

03/11/2022

The amazing students in the AFEL lab have swept the School of Environment, The University of Auckland postgrad awards in Environmental Science. Nice work Amy Ockenden (Research Award), Jopi Benavente Paredes (PhD Thesis award), Briar Kench (Masters Thesis Award) and Zoe Xhou (30 point Masters Thesis award)!

08/08/2022

We have funding available for a PhD student interested in studying the ecological effects of micro- and nanoplastics!

PhD Project - Ecological effects of micro- and nanoplatics at University of Auckland, listed on FindAPhD.com

02/06/2022

Congratulations to Amy Ockenden for another paper published from her PhD research! Microplastic alone has little ecological effect on food web interactions in streams, but when chemical additives enter the mix it's a different story...

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2022.119558

School of Environment, The University of Auckland

06/04/2022

What's the best way to simulate a river network for modelling?Finnbar Lee has a new paper out from his PhD thesis that will tell you! School of Environment, The University of Auckland Faculty of Science, University of Auckland

River networks are frequently simulated for use in the development and testing of ecological theory. Currently, two main algorithms are used, stochastic branching networks (SBNs) and optimal chann...

18/03/2022

Do you live near the Whau river and want to learn more about your awa? Are you interested to hear how we have been working with the local community to understand plastic and emerging contaminant pollution? Join us at this online webinar!

Our beautiful Whau River is a stunning natural asset that many people live, work or play on or near every day. But its health is at risk from pollutants such as microplastics and chemicals. The good news is that there are simple things you can do to help reduce these risks. And those small actions d...

02/03/2022

Nitrogen pollution from the atmosphere falls across whole landscapes, but terrestrial and aquatic systems respond differently to it. Results from an experiment in which a whole catchment was fertilized with nitrogen by helicopter for 25 years! Unfortunately we did not get to fly the helicopter...we had to let the real pilot do that. School of Environment, The University of Auckland Faculty of Science, University of Auckland University of Maine

Elevated deposition of atmospheric nitrogen (N) has shifted nutrient availability in terrestrial and aquatic habitats of ecosystems, but rarely are ecosystem processes in those components examined simultaneously. We used a multi-decadal, whole, paired watershed experiment to determine how chronic N....

26/02/2022

Do nanoplastics move through food webs and what ecological effect do they have? Do warming and nutrient enrichment affect what they do? Amy Ockenden will be able to answer those questions soon when she's done running a mesocosm experiment using nanoplastics with a palladium tracer that allows us to follow them through food webs.

21/02/2022

Contemporary evolution and phenotypic plasticity combine to shape fish response to warming. New paper out by Jopi Benavente Paredes and the geothermal Gambusia team - Dave Frxl, Eric Palkovacs, Michael Kinnison. Thanks Marsden Fund! School of Environment, The University of Auckland; Faculty of Science, University of Auckland

Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

01/02/2022

You can learn quite a bit from analyzing DNA in lake sediments, but you need to know how to do it. Katie tells you how in her new paper!

Lake sediments hold a wealth of information from past environments that is highly valuable for paleolimnological reconstructions. These studies increasingly apply modern molecular tools targeting sedimentary DNA (sedDNA). However, sediment core sampling can be logistically difficult, making immediat...