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| Name: Dr. Jane Marks |
Research Interests: Studies of how abiotic and biotic factors structure freshwater food webs; anthropogenic disturbances of watershed nutrient loading and alterations of flow regimes upon river foodwebs. |
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| Name: Dr. Joseph Shannon |
Research Interests: Aquatic ecology, specifically mechanisms governing river ecosystems and how to monitor them |
Research Description:
Dr. Shannon's research focuses on understanding processes affecting community structure. For example, how chemical cues contribute to benthic patchiness or how stable isotope values change over several hundred km of a river and the implications for food web construction. Impacts of dam operations and river regulation are another area of interest with an emphasis on the Colorado River drainage. |
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| Name: Dr. Meribeth Watwood |
Research Interests: Biodegradation of organic compounds, soil microbial ecology, bioremediation, nutrient cycling, wetland ecology |
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Dr. Watwood's laboratory uses a variety of molecular and functional methods to estimate species diversity, examine how microbial communities interact with various environmental components, and explore linkages between community structure and function. Her lab is also actively developing new techniques to detect specific microbial activities in the environment. Her lab has been involved in research relating to the bioremediation of chlorinated solvents for over a decade, and a major thrust of this research has been to develop and assess enzyme activity-dependent probes specific for enzymes involved in the aerobic co-metabolism of solvents, such as trichloroethylene. They have investigated the microbiological fate of agrochemicals, such as polyacrylamide (PAM), in agricultural soils; currently these studies are now being expanded to address the fate of PAM in aquatic systems receiving agricultural effluent. They are also involved with researchers from Idaho State University in a collaborative project to examine microbial community composition and dynamics in constructed wetland sediments and along thermal gradients of hot spring systems in Oregon. Finally, they are beginning to explore the role of viruses in structuring prokaryotic communities in extreme environments. This faculty member is also a mentor in the NSF IGERT
graduate training program: NAU's IGERT PhD program seeks to identify key links between genes and the environment and is designed to train exceptional graduate students in molecular genetics, environmental sciences, and spatio-temporal modeling. |
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