Stream Ecology

Phenology is the study of the timing of major life-cycle events of organisms. A general prediction under climate change is that phenological events will occur earlier with increasingly warmer temperatures. For aquatic insects, a major life-cycle event is emergence, the transition of the aquatic juvenile stage to a terrestrial flying adult. We asked a simple question: If aquatic insects experience warmer water, do they emerge earlier? The answer, it turns out, is not so simple.

A food chain shows what eats what in an environment. A food web shows the structure of the interconnections between multiple food chains. Food webs show the architecture of trophic relationships, revealing the biodiversity and species interactions in an ecosystem. Most research about food webs has focused on species interactions while the influences of surrounding environments often have been overlooked.