Power Lab: Food Web Research

Overview of our Lab

Our group studies food webs in rivers and their watersheds. We are interested in how attributes and performances of species influence their effects in food webs, and how species interactions change under different environmental regimes.
Topics of current interest include:

  • Effects on river food webs of changes in hydrology, temperature, nutrient loading, energy source, and community structure.

  • Impacts on meadow ecosystems of precipitation changes forecast by leading climate models for the California North Coast.

  • Trophic impact of river-derived algal and aquatic insect production on consumers in watersheds, estuaries, and coastal marine ecosystems.

  • Changes in energy sources of food webs down drainage network.

  • Trophic and food web effects of the movement of organisms through river networks.

  • Landscape controls on stream metabolism, algal production, nitrogen fixation, denitrification, and other nutrient fluxes, and on the consumer-resource interactions that influence these processes.

Much of our field work takes place in the watershed of the South fork of the Eel River at the Angelo Coast Range Reserve in Mendocino County, CA. Portions of the south fork of the Eel River,and entire watersheds of several of its tributaries, are protected within the reserve. The Angelo Reserve is one of the 38 large protected natural reserves dedicated to university-level research and teaching in the University of California Natural Reserve System.

 

Mary Power

Mary Eleanor Power
Professor

Department of Integrative Biology
University of California Berkeley

Contact:

mepower@berkeley.edu
(510) 643-7776

Office: 4184 VLSB
Lab: 4180 VLSB

Mailing Address:

3040 Valley Life Sciences Building #3140
Deparment of Integrative Biology
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-3140

Integrative Biology Department

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