2023 Early Hearing Detection & Intervention Conference

March 5-7, 2023 • Cincinnati, OH

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5/23/2019  |   9:45 AM - 10:00 AM   |  AN EXPERIMENTAL TEST OF CLIMATE DRIVEN CHANGES IN STREAM TEMPERATURE, LIGHT, AND NUTRIENT AVAILABILITY ON BIOFILMS AND NUTRIENT DYNAMICS   |  250 AB

AN EXPERIMENTAL TEST OF CLIMATE DRIVEN CHANGES IN STREAM TEMPERATURE, LIGHT, AND NUTRIENT AVAILABILITY ON BIOFILMS AND NUTRIENT DYNAMICS

Understanding how environmental conditions such as streamwater temperature, light, and nutrient availability act as mechanistic drivers of stream biofilm development is critical to understanding how climate driven changes in these conditions could affect stream food webs and river biogeochemistry. Biofilm availability and elemental resource quality are critical for invertebrate consumers, and biofilms also drive whole-river nutrient cycling through uptake and internal cycling. Biofilms in high elevation streams are already subject to changing environmental conditions because snowmelt is advancing rapidly. Therefore, we manipulated light, temperature, and nutrient availability in two experiments conducted in flow-through stream channels at 2896 m to determine how these factors influence the seasonal trajectory of biofilm biomass, resource quality (e.g., %P, %N), and nutrient uptake (NH4-N, NO3-N, PO4-P). Preliminary analyses show that warm, low-light conditions (favoring bacteria) reduced biofilm biomass and increased %P relative to ambient conditions across the season; whereas, a nutrient pulse temporarily increased algal biomass and %P. Warming accelerated phosphorus and ammonium uptake, but not nitrate, consistent with predicted shifts towards bacterial communities. Our results suggest that following early snowmelt, warm and turbid streams could develop high resource quality biofilms dominated by bacteria.

  • ClimateChange
  • Primary Production
  • Algae

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Presenters/Authors

Jared Balik (), North Carolina State University, Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, jabalik2@ncsu.edu;


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Brad Taylor (), North Carolina State University Dept. of Applied Ecology; Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, bwtaylo3@ncsu.edu ;


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