Apr 1, 2017 - How Many Limnologists Does it Take to Fix the Plumbing?: Editor ' s Note. Editor ' s Note: In this issue of The Paper Trail , a weekly dinner club, ...
How Many Limnologists Does it Take to Fix the Plumbing?: Editor ’s Note
Editor’s Note: In this issue of The Paper Trail, a weekly dinner club, during which ecology was discussed and the blossoming of a relationship fueled in part by differences in the results from a field research study, helped connect two scientists with an interest in carbon. The basic premise is that aquatic ecosystems cycle carbon through various processes and to and from a range of contributors in what has been referred to as active and passive conduits or “pipes.” Whether at the global or local scale, limnologists, like these two researchers who study lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, and wetlands, would argue that these aquatic systems are anything but simple pipes. The complexity of these systems has challenged them and their terrestrial-minded colleagues with still much more to learn. — Stephen L.Young
How Many Limnologists Does It Take to Fix the Plumbing? The Arising Researcher In my junior year at Saint Olaf College, I joined a literature group called Discussions in Ecology (DIE; an unfortunate acronym). Led by two devoted ecology professors, the members of DIE gathered weekly over dinner to discuss a foundational or new paper in ecology. As we were at an undergraduate-only institution, this was our substitute for a weekly lab meeting and a way to foster community. I had only recently switched the focus of my biology major from biochemistry, in which I was a decidedly mediocre student, to ecology. The change in academic focus was precipitated by my first field experience, assisting with a beaver population survey in northern Minnesota as a part of a January interim course. I reasoned that if I could still love a subject after 20 days of pursuing it in
below-freezing temperatures, it was worth pursuing as a career. (However, the following January I decided I had experienced enough frozen field work and took a tropical biology course instead.) At one DIE meeting in the spring of 2009, we read Jon Cole and colleagues’ “Plumbing the global carbon cycle: Integrating inland waters into the terrestrial carbon budget” (2007, Ecosystems 10:172–185). We had been discussing mass balance approaches and biogeochemical cycles, so the article had been selected to fit both topics. We spent the time over dinner explaining the passive and active pipe metaphor to each other and discussing the assumptions and unknowns in each part of the budget presented in the paper. This was truly the first time that a scientific paper had captured my fascination and discussing it that evening with my make-shift lab group was the beginning of a line of “carbocentric” limnological research (see Prairie (2008) Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 65:543–548) that I pursued The Paper Trail
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Grace trading frozen field work for a more tropical location. (Photo credit: Robert Johnson).
throughout my dissertation and continue to pursue today. The concept that the active pipe diagram illustrates is that inland waters are not simply conduits for terrestrial carbon to the ocean, but instead they actively cycle terrestrial carbon influencing downstream flows. The concept and synthesis of the budget was transformational. For a few years, it seemed as though you couldn’t attend a
How Many Limnologists Does It Take to Fix the Plumbing? The Established Researcher My first exposure to ecosystem ecology and to limnology was at Amherst College where I was an undergraduate. I took Stuart Fisher’s Aquatic Ecology course and became enamored (okay, maybe obsessed) with the idea of material and energy budgets as a way to understand ecosystems. We read the newly minted “Energy flow in Bear Brook, New Hampshire: An integrative approach to stream ecosystem metabolism” by Stuart Fisher and Gene Likens (1973, Ecological Monographs 43:421–439), perhaps in manuscript 100
presentation on aquatic carbon cycling at a meeting and not see the active pipe diagram in the introductory slides. My own dissertation defense began with a cartoonish rendering of the diagram which I used to explain the importance of lakes in regional carbon budgets. In addition to providing context and estimates of the magnitude of the role of inland waters in the terrestrial carbon cycle, Jon and his colleagues’ work also revealed, through a well-laid budgeting framework, the gaps in our knowledge on the subject. In my opinion, this aspect of the paper helped to foster a vast and productive line of research that continues in limnology today. Grace Wilkinson Department of Ecology Evolution and Organismal Biology Iowa State University Ames, Iowa, USA © 2017 The Authors. The Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., on behalf of the Ecological Society of America. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
form with the idea that elemental budgets of carbon could be combined with measurements of metabolism. It was an “ah-ha” moment, as I was struck by this powerful concept and from that point on I, rather over narrowly, conflated ecosystem science with constructing budgets to the exclusion of other ecosystem approaches. Although I broadened my perspective about ecosystem science over time and with the help of colleagues, I am still attracted to the budget and mass balance approach, which one could say has dominated my publications. One of the points that comes across very loud and clear in Stuart and Gene’s work is the huge dominance of the input of terrestrial organic matter
Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, 98(2)
