Welcome to the Halvorson Aquatic Ecology lab at the University of Central Arkansas! We study how aquatic ecosystems work and respond to environmental change.
We tackle this by focusing on energy and nutrient availability as factors limiting organisms and ecosystem processes. Our research combines laboratory experiments, field studies, and data synthesis to connect systems together, often employing the framework of ecological stoichiometry theory with other fields such as metabolic theory, biogeochemistry, and nutritional ecology.
Three broad questions we are investigating:
(1) How do environmental factors affect the activity and interactions of aquatic microbes (bacteria, fungi, algae)?
(2) What nutritional factors determine fitness and physiological regulation of aquatic animals?
(3) What are the functional roles of animals in ecosystem-level processes such as nutrient cycling?
We tackle this by focusing on energy and nutrient availability as factors limiting organisms and ecosystem processes. Our research combines laboratory experiments, field studies, and data synthesis to connect systems together, often employing the framework of ecological stoichiometry theory with other fields such as metabolic theory, biogeochemistry, and nutritional ecology.
Three broad questions we are investigating:
(1) How do environmental factors affect the activity and interactions of aquatic microbes (bacteria, fungi, algae)?
(2) What nutritional factors determine fitness and physiological regulation of aquatic animals?
(3) What are the functional roles of animals in ecosystem-level processes such as nutrient cycling?
LAB NEWS:
November 2021 - It has been a busy Fall as many of our research projects transition with the seasons and everyone balances their course load! Molly's project is humming well along to collect invertebrates across 20 Gulf Coastal Plains stream sites, Anthony has finalized his field sites and methods to collect intensive stoichiometry data from Arkansas streams, and Lydia will work to complete a thesis based on the Brewer Lake monitoring project. We are all grateful to have the help of awesome undergraduate students Aimee, Peyton, Celeste, Brandy, Noah, Beka, Rachel, and Colton.
July 2021 - M.S. student Tori Hebert successfully defended her thesis, "Land use effects on nutrient limitation, priming effects, and detritivore feeding in a Central Arkansas watershed"! She is moving on to pursue at PhD in Biological Sciences at the University of Alabama in Jon Benstead's lab. Congratulations, Tori!!
June 2021 - Welcome to the lab to our new summer 2021 students! Aimee Dycus and Connor Tolly have joined as undergraduate students on the EPSCoR project, as has Anthony Pignatelli as a new graduate student. We have also welcomed Skye Embray as a summer REU student through the UArk EcoREU program and Willow Newman as a new graduate student, both on the Brewer Lake monitoring project!
April 2021 - It has been an exciting spring in the lab, as we published three female students' first first-authored manuscripts in Freshwater Science, Oikos, and Ecology! All projects started while we were at Southern Miss, and we pushed to publication over this past year. We are so proud to see our students Cheyenne, Taylor, and Tori as they have become published scientists!
February 2021 - We have many new developments in the field as we jump-start Molly's DEQ monitoring project in the Ouachita River watershed, the White Oak Bayou monitoring project in Maumelle, and a leaf decomposition experiment in the Point Remove watershed!
January 2021 - A warm welcome to our new students in the lab this semester! We are particularly excited to have Molly Wozniak join us from Lake Superior State University in Michigan. Molly will be completing her Master's Thesis on macroinvertebrate responses to land use change in Gulf Coastal Plains streams of Arkansas.
November 2020 - Congratulations to lab members Tori and Hunter on earning an Audubon Trust fund grant to support their field research project! They will use the funds to study insects colonizing leaf litter in Arkansas streams varying in land-use intensity, as a follow-up to Tori's M.S. thesis project.
October 2020 - Hal presented a research poster at the virtual meeting of the Great Plains Limnology Conference (GPLC). The poster was titled "Algal influences on litter decomposition across experimental dissolved N and P gradients". See below:
CONTACT INFORMATION:
Dr. Hal Halvorson
Assistant Professor
180 Lewis Science Center
Department of Biology
Conway, AR 72035
email: hhalvorson 'at' uca.edu
Dr. Hal Halvorson
Assistant Professor
180 Lewis Science Center
Department of Biology
Conway, AR 72035
email: hhalvorson 'at' uca.edu
