SLO honors Erin Hotchkiss with the 2016 Raymond L. Lindeman Award

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Dr. Erin Hotchkiss

Dr. Erin Hotchkiss, a faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech and a Global Change Center affiliate, recently received The Raymond L. Lindeman Award from the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO). This award honors a scientist of 35 years of age or less for an outstanding peer-reviewed, English-language paper in the aquatic sciences. ASLO awarded Dr. Hotchkiss with the 2016 Lindeman Award for her paper, “High rates of daytime respiration in three streams: Use of δ18OO2 and OO2 to model diel ecosystem metabolism.” The award was presented at the ASLO 2016 Summer Meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Hotchkiss’s 2014 Limnology and Oceanography paper, co-authored by R.O. Hall, Jr., made a significant contribution to the understanding of aquatic ecosystem metabolism and, in particular, the relative importance of daytime and nighttime respiration in freshwaters. Despite decades of exploration, many of the underlying assumptions in investigations of ecosystem metabolism have remained untested. Erin’s paper directly tested one such assumption: that respiration rates are constant over a 24-hour period. Hotchkiss took an innovative approach to challenge this assumption using oxygen isotopes to estimate diel variation in respiration. Her combined field and modeling study provides perhaps the strongest empirical evidence to date demonstrating major differences (2 to 4-fold) between daytime and nighttime oxygen cycling in aquatic environments.

“Metabolism is a core property of aquatic ecosystems but some key assumptions about measuring it had been untested prior to this paper. Erin’s sophisticated approach to understand the two-way movement of oxygen between water bodies and the atmosphere is critical to improving our understanding of ecosystem dynamics in streams,” stated Jim Elser, president of ASLO.

ASLO Award Announcement

Citation:
Hotchkiss, E.R., and Hall, R.O., 2014, High rates of daytime respiration in three streams: Use of δ18OO2 and OO2 to model diel ecosystem metabolism. Limnol. Oceanogr. 59(3): 798-810.

Video:
Hotchkiss Award Presentation at ASLO Summer Meeting, Santa Fe

In June 2016, Dr. Hotchkiss also received the Hynes Award for New Investigators from the Society of Freshwater Science. This honor is awarded to a benthic scientist who was a senior author of an outstanding primary publication in benthic science.