Seminar of Jason Stockwell

FreshH2OZoops – Synthesizing Patterns and Drivers of Changes in Zooplankton CommunityDynamics Worldwide 

Despitethe critical services freshwater systems provide, freshwater biodiversity hasbeen vastly under-studied compared to terrestrial and marine biomes. In fact,systematic compilations of freshwater zooplankton are surprisingly rare despitethe critical roles zooplankton play in regulating and supporting ecosystemservices, serving as key indicator species, and consequently, influencingemergent system properties such as water quality and food web structure. Wehave compiled and harmonized the most temporally and spatially extensivefreshwater zooplankton dataset available to date – zooplankton, environmental,morphometric, and spatial variables from 288 lakes (36 countries, 6 continents)with time series ranging from 1 to 60 years (40% > 10 years), with amajority of lakes sampled at monthly or sub-monthly frequencies. The dataset,called the Zooplankton International Geospatial (ZIG) dataset, is also designedto seamlessly integrate with existing in situ and remote sensing data andmodeling products. Our international team is using ZIG to develop and applyapproaches to understand links between zooplankton functional biodiversity andemergent functional attributes of lakes worldwide. Our goal is to advance ourunderstanding of zooplankton roles in ecosystem-level processes to enhance ourability to predict the impacts of changing biodiversity and forecast changes inecosystem processes using a mechanistic framework that links ecosystem functionwith species traits and trait diversity. We ask questions at a global scale,overcoming past data limitations that have kept the scope of studies limited tospecific regions or to a few lakes with long time series. In this seminar, Iwill provide an overview of ZIG, our questions and approaches, and somepreliminary and high-level results, with a particular focus on the ability ofspace-for-time substitution surveys to

capturereproducible patterns in temporal zooplankton community dynamics and thusrepresent valid spatial proxies for biodiversity trends.