Overview of our Lab

• interplay of trophic dynamics with hydrologic and productivity regimes in rivers potential effects of climate change on food webs in rivers and meadows
• impacts of invading exotic species food web links between rivers and their watersheds, specifically, the influence of river-derived insect production on terrestrial consumers in watersheds (spiders, lizards, bats)
• effects of fine bed sediments on juvenile steelhead and the food webs that support their growth changes in energy sources to food webs down drainage networks
• landscape controls on stream metabolism, fluxes, and consumer-resource interactions
• interplay between spatial fluxes of energy and nutrients to food webs and outcomes of local species interactions

Much of our experimental work takes place in the South Fork Eel River and its tributaries, within the Angelo Coast Range Reserve in Mendocino County, CA. The Angelo Reserve is one of the University of California Natural Reserve System's 35 research and teaching reserves.  In collaboration with Profs. Jeff Mount and Jim Quinn at U.C. Davis, we are studying aerial-aquatic and aquatic-soil food web interactions at The Nature Conservancy restoration of the Cosumnes River floodplain. In collaboration with Jill Banfield in Earth and Planetary Science at Berkeley, we also study "extreme" food webs in acid mine drainage communities.

Mary Eleanor Power
Professor

Department of Integrative Biology
University of California Berkeley

  email:   mepower@berkeley.edu
  office:   4184 VLSB, (510) 643-7776
      lab:   4180 VLSB, (510) 643-9294
  mailing address:
    3060 Valley Life Sciences Building #3140
    Department of Integrative Biology
    University of California
    Berkeley, CA 94720-3140