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Summer of 2022, I spent most of it in Madison, WI working from the Center of Limnology sampling Lake Mendota. I was interested in how precipitation events influence the water chemistry and biology of the eutrophic lake. While we did observe some spatial variability in water chemistry and biology, more importantly we noticed that each inlet had a unique chemical signature and range of influence. It seemed that in this dry year, the centralized buoy was never able to detect major changes, while the fine resolution spatial sampling was able to detect before and after precipitation events. |
Summer of 2021 I spent my third year in the Northern Highlands Lake District, working from the UW Trout Lake Station. I spent my summer with the FLAMe system, this time using it to capture diel change in water chemistry along gradient of trophic lakes. I spatially sampled 4 lakes over a 24-hour period, multiple times throughout the summer. I sampled lakes during key moments in the diel cycle (sunrise, noon, sunset, and midnight), which meant an exhausting summer of collecting exciting data. A video example of what sampling at midnight is included at the top left of this page. This intense sampling schedule was also maintained by Cory Vines, a UW-Madison student who helped me sample all summer.
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Summer of 2020 I spent it based out of UW Trout Lake Station where I used FLAMe to sample lakes of high(er/ish) TP concentrations. I sampled 26 different lakes three times this summer. My sampling spanned several counties across the WI northern lake district. In addition to chl-a (photo to the left) we also collected temperature profiles, secchi depth, TN/TP, C samples. Using the FLAMe we are able to collect high density spatial data for phycocyanin, fDOM, pH, and conductivity. This was of course done with the help of Kevin Gauthier Jr.
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Summer 2019 I started collecting data for my dissertation at UNDERC. The project consists of comparing temporal and spatial early warnings of an impending induced bloom. Paring high frequency sensors at the deep point of the lake and spatially sampling the lake using the FLAMe system we are able to compare both sampling approaches.
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One of my chapters of my masters project was to monitor Swan Lake, IA for early warning indicators prior to a bloom. The shallow and hypertrophic lake has a history of intense blooms and fish kills. To monitor for early warnings to the bloom, we used a high frequency recording sensors for the summer months. We than applied a rolling window analysis, post hoc, and looked at some summary statistics like lag-1 auto correlation and standard deviation. We combined our time series with other lake years of high frequency data. We were able to detect early warnings to blooms up to a month and half in advance, while missing some blooms entirely.
https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.3200 |
The second chapter of my masters work was to look for evidence of regime sifts in Swan Lake in space. We designed a robust sampling scheme of both sampling frequency (weekly) and spatial resolution (65 meters). We were able to apply standard deviation and Moran's I calculations for evidence of regime shifts. We were very successful in detecting regime shifts into bloom states and were able to interpret them as early warnings!
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecs2.3200 |