Wading Through Research

By Keely Mills* I am a fan of hot temperatures and sunny climates. This may sound strange coming from someone who lives in a wet and grey part of the UK ( Nottingham ). However, hot weather is one of the main reasons I love researching tropical lakes, and a trait I share with the January 2017 ‘Diatom of the Month’. I would like to introduce you to my favourite diatom: Amphora coffeaeformis (Fig. 1) [now renamed Halamphora coffeaeformis ] – a salt-tolerant species, indicating a shallow, slightly saline environment (Gasse, 1986). Fig. 1 . A specimen of Amphora coffeaeformis found in the sediments of Lake Nyamogusingiri, Uganda (photo: K. Mills). So, how did I come to ‘discover’ this diatom, and how did it come to be my favourite? My story starts as a new Ph.D. student at Loughborough University in 2005. I was working with Dr David Ryves on a project focussed on the Ugandan Crater Lakes, where I would use a palaeolimnological approach to infer past climate and enviro...

Polar bear! In the EVERGLADES?!?! So how many of you know the poem "Algy"? " Algy met a bear. The bear met Algy. The bear was bulgy. The bulge was Algy ."

I did this video, “Climate Change in Everglades National Park: Sea Level Rise”, at the request of my funding source, The George Melendez Wright Climate Change Fellowship. They wanted all the fellows to present a three minute video of their work at the 2013 George Wright Society Conference on Parks, Protected Areas, and Cultural Sites. I took this opportunity to create a video overview of my research and its importance to Everglades National Park and the rare plant communities being impacted by sea level rise. My hopes are to get this information out to a broader audience to engender a better understanding of how conservation research can be used to help protect rare plant species. - Kristie Wendelberger

Happy new year folks!   I am writing today to discuss extreme ecology! As much as I wish that “extreme ecology” is studying ecology while surfing or snowboarding, it is not. Rather, extreme ecology or the” ecology of extremes” is the study of how ecosystems change following very rare natural disturbances.   These disturbances are more like natural disasters, that include volcanic eruptions, biblical floods, hurricanes, super storms, and boiling heat waves.  Extreme disturbance events are so harmful because they often kill everything that happened to be in the path of the disturbance. On top of destroying ecosystems, these events incur billions of dollars of damages to humans.  The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens provides a good example of an extreme disturbance event.  Mount St. Helens before and after the 1980 eruption