Amy Rosemond

Last updated
Amy Rosemond
Alma mater University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (B.S., M.A.), Vanderbilt University (PhD)
Known for Ecosystem ecology, Biogeochemistry
Scientific career
Institutions University of Georgia

Amy D. Rosemond is an American aquatic ecosystem ecologist, biogeochemist, and Distinguished Research Professor [1] at the Odum School of Ecology at the University of Georgia. [2] Rosemond studies how global change affects freshwater ecosystems, including effects of watershed urbanization, nutrient pollution, and changes in biodiversity on ecosystem function. She was elected an Ecological Society of America fellow in 2018, [3] and served as president of the Society for Freshwater Science from 2019-2020. [4]

Contents

Education and early career

Rosemond grew up in Florida in the 1970s, where her love of nature was confronted by increasing human pressures on the environment. [5] Rosemond earned her Bachelor of Sciences degree in zoology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She remained at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill to complete her Master of Arts degree in biology.

Rosemond went on to earn a Ph.D. in biology at Vanderbilt University, where she was co-advised by Vanderbilt faculty Susan Brawley and Oak Ridge National Laboratory research scientist Patrick J. Mulholland. Rosemond conducted her dissertation research at the Oak Ridge National Lab, in Tennessee, USA, studying how both top-down predation and bottom-up nutrient availability affect periphyton in headwater streams.

After completing her Ph.D. in 1993, Rosemond was awarded a National Science Foundation postdoctoral research fellowship in environmental biology. She completed her postdoc at the Institute of Ecology at the University of Georgia, during which she conducted research at La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica examining the top-down and bottom-up effects of predatory fishes and shrimps and phosphorus, respectively, on leaf-litter breakdown and carbon processing. [6] [7] While working at La Selva, Rosemond also conducted research on landscape-scale variation in stream phosphorus concentrations, and its effects on stream detritivore food webs. [8]

Career

Rosemond worked as the assistant director of the Institute of Ecology at the University of Georgia from 1998-2005. [9] She became an assistant professor at the University of Georgia in 2005 in the Odum School of Ecology, an associate professor in 2011, and a professor in 2017. [9] As of 2019, she has advised or co-advised 17 graduate students and three postdocs at Georgia. [9] Broadly, Rosemond and her lab members research the mechanisms and processes that underlie aquatic ecosystem health and function, and seek to understand how stream and river health is altered by human activities and global change. [9] This involves studying how different stressors, including excess nutrients and land-use change through urbanization, affect ecosystem processes.

Excess nutrients and stream ecosystem function

Leveraging partnerships with the Coweeta Hydrologic Lab long-term ecological research site, Rosemond and her colleagues have used whole-ecosystem experiments to understand how stream carbon stocks, benthic macroinvertebrates, and higher trophic levels, including salamanders, respond to nitrogen and phosphorus pollution. Her research in this area focuses on how terrestrially-derived detrital carbon, including leaves, sticks, and wood that fall into streams, is processed and transmitted through aquatic food webs that are exposed to excess nutrients. She has led research to test the relative importance of nitrogen and phosphorus limitation in stream carbon processing through whole-stream nutrient enrichment studies. Through this work, Rosemond and her collaborators have increased understanding of how nutrients affect energy flow in detritus-based food webs, as previous research on nutrient effects in streams often focused on photosynthetic, algal pathways. [10] [11]

Awards

Publications

Selected journal articles

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ecosystem</span> Community of living organisms together with the nonliving components of their environment

An ecosystem consists of all the organisms and the physical environment with which they interact. These biotic and abiotic components are linked together through nutrient cycles and energy flows. Energy enters the system through photosynthesis and is incorporated into plant tissue. By feeding on plants and on one another, animals play an important role in the movement of matter and energy through the system. They also influence the quantity of plant and microbial biomass present. By breaking down dead organic matter, decomposers release carbon back to the atmosphere and facilitate nutrient cycling by converting nutrients stored in dead biomass back to a form that can be readily used by plants and microbes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Food web</span> Natural interconnection of food chains

A food web is the natural interconnection of food chains and a graphical representation of what-eats-what in an ecological community. Another name for food web is consumer-resource system. Ecologists can broadly lump all life forms into one of two categories based on their trophic levels, the position it occupies in the food web: 1) the autotrophs, and 2) the heterotrophs. To maintain their bodies, grow, develop, and to reproduce, autotrophs produce organic matter from inorganic substances, including both minerals and gases such as carbon dioxide. These chemical reactions require energy, which mainly comes from the Sun and largely by photosynthesis, although a very small amount comes from bioelectrogenesis in wetlands, and mineral electron donors in hydrothermal vents and hot springs. These trophic levels are not binary, but form a gradient that includes complete autotrophs, which obtain their sole source of carbon from the atmosphere, mixotrophs, which are autotrophic organisms that partially obtain organic matter from sources other than the atmosphere, and complete heterotrophs that must feed to obtain organic matter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Energy flow (ecology)</span> Flow of energy through food chains in ecological energetics

Energy flow is the flow of energy through living things within an ecosystem. All living organisms can be organized into producers and consumers, and those producers and consumers can further be organized into a food chain. Each of the levels within the food chain is a trophic level. In order to more efficiently show the quantity of organisms at each trophic level, these food chains are then organized into trophic pyramids. The arrows in the food chain show that the energy flow is unidirectional, with the head of an arrow indicating the direction of energy flow; energy is lost as heat at each step along the way.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Benthic zone</span> Ecological region at the lowest level of a body of water

The benthic zone is the ecological region at the lowest level of a body of water such as an ocean, lake, or stream, including the sediment surface and some sub-surface layers. The name comes from ancient Greek, βένθος (bénthos), meaning "the depths." Organisms living in this zone are called benthos and include microorganisms as well as larger invertebrates, such as crustaceans and polychaetes. Organisms here generally live in close relationship with the substrate and many are permanently attached to the bottom. The benthic boundary layer, which includes the bottom layer of water and the uppermost layer of sediment directly influenced by the overlying water, is an integral part of the benthic zone, as it greatly influences the biological activity that takes place there. Examples of contact soil layers include sand bottoms, rocky outcrops, coral, and bay mud.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eugene Odum</span>

Eugene Pleasants Odum was an American biologist at the University of Georgia known for his pioneering work on ecosystem ecology. He and his brother Howard T. Odum wrote the popular ecology textbook, Fundamentals of Ecology (1953). The Odum School of Ecology is named in his honor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bioturbation</span> Reworking of soils and sediments by organisms.

Bioturbation is defined as the reworking of soils and sediments by animals or plants. It includes burrowing, ingestion, and defecation of sediment grains. Bioturbating activities have a profound effect on the environment and are thought to be a primary driver of biodiversity. The formal study of bioturbation began in the 1800s by Charles Darwin experimenting in his garden. The disruption of aquatic sediments and terrestrial soils through bioturbating activities provides significant ecosystem services. These include the alteration of nutrients in aquatic sediment and overlying water, shelter to other species in the form of burrows in terrestrial and water ecosystems, and soil production on land.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ecosystem ecology</span> Study of living and non-living components of ecosystems and their interactions

Ecosystem ecology is the integrated study of living (biotic) and non-living (abiotic) components of ecosystems and their interactions within an ecosystem framework. This science examines how ecosystems work and relates this to their components such as chemicals, bedrock, soil, plants, and animals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">River ecosystem</span> Type of aquatic ecosystem with flowing freshwater

River ecosystems are flowing waters that drain the landscape, and include the biotic (living) interactions amongst plants, animals and micro-organisms, as well as abiotic (nonliving) physical and chemical interactions of its many parts. River ecosystems are part of larger watershed networks or catchments, where smaller headwater streams drain into mid-size streams, which progressively drain into larger river networks. The major zones in river ecosystems are determined by the river bed's gradient or by the velocity of the current. Faster moving turbulent water typically contains greater concentrations of dissolved oxygen, which supports greater biodiversity than the slow-moving water of pools. These distinctions form the basis for the division of rivers into upland and lowland rivers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ecological stoichiometry</span>

Ecological stoichiometry considers how the balance of energy and elements influences living systems. Similar to chemical stoichiometry, ecological stoichiometry is founded on constraints of mass balance as they apply to organisms and their interactions in ecosystems. Specifically, how does the balance of energy and elements affect and how is this balance affected by organisms and their interactions. Concepts of ecological stoichiometry have a long history in ecology with early references to the constraints of mass balance made by Liebig, Lotka, and Redfield. These earlier concepts have been extended to explicitly link the elemental physiology of organisms to their food web interactions and ecosystem function.

Monica G. Turner is an American ecologist known for her work at Yellowstone National Park since the large fires of 1988. She is currently the Eugene P. Odum Professor of Ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Sarah E. Hobbie is an American ecologist, currently at the University of Minnesota, a National Academy of Sciences Fellow for Ecology, Evolution and Behavior in 2014 and a formerly Minnesota McKnight Land-Grant Professor.

Nancy B. Grimm is an American ecosystem ecologist and professor at Arizona State University. Grimm's substantial contributions to the understanding of urban and arid ecosystem biogeochemistry are recognized in her numerous awards. Grimm is an elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, Ecological Society of America, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Emily Stanley is an American professor of limnology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She was named a 2018 Ecological Society of America Fellow and her research focuses on the ecology of freshwater ecosystems.

Kathryn Linn Cottingham is a Professor of Ecology, Evolution, Environment and Society in the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. She is a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America and American Association for the Advancement of Science. From 2020 she will serve as editor-in-chief of the journal Ecology.

Catherine Mann Pringle is a distinguished research professor at the Odum School of Ecology at the University of Georgia. She studies aquatic ecosystems and conservation. Pringle has previously served as president of the Society for Freshwater Science. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Ecological Society of America.

Kathleen C. Weathers is an ecosystem scientist and the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Chair in Ecology at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. Her expertise focuses on understanding the ecology of air-land-water interactions. Weathers is the current elected President of the Ecological Society of America (2020-2021).

Aimée Classen is an American ecologist who studies the impact of global changes on a diverse array of terrestrial ecosystems. Her work is notable for its span across ecological scales and concepts, and the diversity of terrestrial ecosystems that it encompasses, including forests, meadows, bogs, and tropics in temperate and boreal climates.

Luiz Alonso Ramírez Ulate is a Costa Rican ecologist and a professor at North Carolina State University. From 2020 to 2021 he served as president of the Society for Freshwater Science.

The Hynes Award is awarded by the Society for Freshwater Science and recognizes an excellent academic research paper in the freshwater sciences by a scientist less than five years after their terminal graduate degree. Recipients of the award have gone on to become leading senior researchers, serving as science advisors to various governments and states, and held leadership positions in national and international scientific societies.

Jane Claire Marks is an American conservation ecologist and educator. She holds the title of Professor of Aquatic Ecology at Northern Arizona University. Marks is known for her scientific research about food webs and dam removals and for her work in education and outreach.

References

  1. 1 2 "Distinguished Research Professor- University of Georgia".
  2. ↑ "Amy Rosemond, Odum School". ecology.uga.edu. Retrieved 2019-03-12.
  3. 1 2 "ESA Fellows". Ecological Society of America. Retrieved 2019-03-12.
  4. ↑ "SFS Executive Committee" . Retrieved 2019-03-12.
  5. ↑ "UGA Center for Integrative Conservation Research Featured Researcher". Archived from the original on 2019-09-29. Retrieved 2019-03-12.
  6. ↑ Rosemond, Amy D.; Pringle, Catherine M.; Ramírez, Alonso; Paul, Michael J. (2001). "A Test of Top-down and Bottom-up Control in a Detritus-Based Food Web". Ecology. 82 (8): 2279–2293. doi:10.1890/0012-9658(2001)082[2279:ATOTDA]2.0.CO;2.
  7. ↑ Rosemond, Amy D.; Pringle, Catherine M.; Ramirez, Alonso (1998). "Macroconsumer effects on insect detritivores and detritus processing in a tropical stream". Freshwater Biology. 39 (3): 515–523. doi:10.1046/j.1365-2427.1998.00301.x.
  8. ↑ Rosemond, Amy D.; Pringle, Catherine M.; Ramírez, Alonso; Paul, Michael J.; Meyer, Judy L. (2002). "Landscape variation in phosphorus concentration and effects on detritus-based tropical streams". Limnology and Oceanography. 47 (1): 278–289. Bibcode:2002LimOc..47..278R. doi:10.4319/lo.2002.47.1.0278. S2CID   27822697.
  9. 1 2 3 4 "Rosemond Lab – Aquatic ecosystem ecology" . Retrieved 2019-03-12.
  10. ↑ Paul, Michael J. "Algal indicators in streams: a review of their application in water quality management of nutrient pollution" (PDF). US EPA White Paper.
  11. 1 2 "Creative Research Medal, Research Awards, Office of Research, University of Georgia". Research Awards. Retrieved 2019-03-12.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.