Government agencies have long collected biological samples to assess and monitor the environmental health of streams and rivers. In California, one such example of this monitoring is the Surface Water Ambient Monitoring Protocol (SWAMP); monitoring under this protocol has generated a vast amount of data that has recently been made publicly available. These data include samples taken at multiple time points at sites throughout the state of California. While the amount of data produced is large relative to what is typically available in the fields of ecology and conservation, data gaps and unbalanced coverage lead to analysis challenges. I will report on efforts by my lab and collaborators to use these data to infer how environmental features influence the assembly and persistence of ecological communities. I will focus on results obtained for stream insect communities, in particular how their diversity and composition change over space and time. Furthermore, I will describe modeling efforts being used to understand the complex ways in which stream communities may respond to environmental variation and to generate hypotheses that are portable to other ecological systems.

Prof. Kurt Anderson