Hotchkiss awarded NSF funding to examine the consequences of warming in streams

Congratulations to Dr. Erin Hotchkiss in the Department of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech.  Dr. Hotchkiss and her colleagues recently received research funding from the National Science Foundation. Their project will examine the consequences of warming for organic matter cycling in streams.

Title: “Headwater stream networks in a warming world: Predicting heterotrophic ecosystem function using theory, multi-scale temperature manipulations, and modeling”

Principal Investigators: J.P. Benstead (Alabama), V. Gulis (Coastal Carolina), A.M. Helton (University of Connecticut), A.D. Rosemond (UGA), E.R. Hotchkiss (Virginia Tech).

Summary: This project will test the effects of temperature on organic matter breakdown at the stream reach and stream network scales. We will measure organism, ecosystem process, leaf litter, and water chemistry responses to a whole-stream warming experiment at Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory, NC to (1) inform ecological theory that uses basic principles to understand how the effects of temperature scale from individual organisms to entire ecosystems, and (2) build a model that simulates the effects of temperature on organic matter processing at the stream network scale.