Ruric successfully defended his honors thesis (just in time) titled "Vertical migration of adult Plecoptera (stoneflies) above forested headwater streams". This was the culmination of a long-term project examining adult stream insects in forest canopies. What's especially impressive is that this wasn't supposed to be Ruric's thesis even though he presented on the topic at several meetings (including the national meeting for the Society for Freshwater Science). Ruric was in the middle of his project examining predator-prey dynamics when campus was closed. Since he couldn't finish that project, he set down that thesis and wrote this one in pretty short order. Ruric is the first students to receive departmental honors working with me. I hope to have an announcement about graduate school plans for Ruric soon!

Mikayla joined my lab fully in her senior year after working for me as the the Teaching Assistant for my Introduction to GIS course. She had an interest in learning to use GIS for research in conservation biology. We collaborated on a study examining the concurrent effects of landscape geometry and urbanization on vulnerability to climate change that Mikalya used as the basis of an independent study in her final semester. She presented the research virtually to the department through a talk titled "Geographic assessment of landscape vulnerability to climate change". Mikayla was able to complete the work while working remotely from home (rather than in my lab). While I was there to support her work, she definitely showed an ability to work independently on this research.

Braeden wasn't really 'my' research student since he worked with most of the CWI staff and students, but in his final semester I was lucky to have the opportunity to work with him on water chemistry data collected from the Loyalsock Creek and a project examining novel pollutants (personal care products and pharmaceuticals) along a stormwater gradient. The research is in progress (and I hope Braeden continues to work with me on the analysis), and it represents a major step towards important collaborations between the CWI and the Lycoming College Chemistry department. Braeden will continue his work at Bloomsburg University working on an MS with Dr. Steve Rier.

I'm excited to say that I co-authored 2 pretty cool papers recently that are now both in early view stage. One study shows that stream insects, and specifically certain taxa of stoneflies, prefer to emerge from streams using emergent wood over emergent rocks or other submerged substrates (https://doi.org/10.1093/ee/nvz106). The other study examined the response of stream insects to a novel restoration on Big Spring Run (Lancaster County: ), which found that the restoration had no effect on the stream insect community, but more interestingly (in our opinion) the approach we used that analyzed several subsets of the data and multiple assessment approaches created a holistic narrative about project outcomes that was more compelling than a simple statistics-based approach (https://doi.org/10.1002/rra.3556). What was really exciting is that both of these manuscripts were undergraduate student research projects. The emergence study led by Kristin Cheney who as an undergraduate at UMass when I was a postdoc. Several undergraduates at Millersville University including co-authors Emily Neideigh and Alex Rittle did the heavy lifting during the field and lab stages of the work. Let me know if you need a reprint of these (or any) of my manuscripts.

The field work for Brittany Lenze's research project on the effects of soil warming on the growth of Canada Thistle came to an end a little over 2 weeks ago when we harvested the plants that originally started out as rhizomes last June. This is the second phase of her research that included a greenhouse experiment last year. The preliminary results are, thus far, quite interesting. In addition to finding a potentially novel herbivore on this invasive plant species, we were able to demonstrate 1) that any system with pots above the ground won't mimic the amplitude of soil temperature variations seen in the surrounding soil and 2) that the the plastic sheeting (not temperature) resulted in increased plant biomass. We also found an interesting result (pictured to the right) where the roots of this species spread prolifically down through the pots, into the surrounding soil, and sprouted under the plastic. I am not an expert on this species, but our experience collecting rhizomes and the literature we reviewed suggested that root growth would be more modest. Great stuff!

Brittany Lenze (Class of 2019, top) and Ruric Bowman (Class of 2020, bottom) presented their research on the effects of climate change on invasive plants and evolution of dispersal traits in stream insects at the 2018 Susquehanna River Symposium. While nobody brought home any awards, I was super proud of them both for putting together posters demonstrating their hypothesis driven, well thought-out research. I'm especially proud of Brittany whose Canada Thistle plots were harvested just a few days prior to the meeting. Learn more about the meeting HERE.