Goss Graduate Defense Seminar

Charles Goss, PhD Candidate, will present Influence of Forest Fragments on Headwater Stream Ecosystems in Agricultural Landscapes, for his Graduate Defense Seminar.

It is widely recognized that headwater streams are intimately associated with riparian forests.  Forest-stream linkages are manifest in a variety of ways ranging from filtering nutrients and trapping sediment to providing habitat and food resources for stream food webs.  Similarly, forests are linked with streams via aquatic-to-terrestrial fluxes of aquatic emergent insects which provide important resources for terrestrial food webs.  However, in agricultural landscapes forests have largely been cleared for human land-uses that have functionally decoupled forest-stream dynamics over a range of spatial scales.  Remnant fragments of forest in these landscapes are often small and isolated, but may be able to retain functional linkages between forests and streams that are otherwise absent.  In this exit seminar I present results from a series of studies conducted for my dissertation research with the goal of assessing the influence of forest fragments on the reciprocal linkages between forests and streams in agricultural landscapes.  

This seminar will take place Friday, December 6th, at 9:00 a.m. in 333 Kottman Hall with a video link to 117A Williams Hall.