Collin Bode, Spatialist
M.S. Energy and Resources, UC Berkeley, 1998
collin@berkeley.edu

Project Manager for the Desktop Watershed IP, National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics (NCED). Designed and created the Angelo Reserve Environmental Observatory. I work in wireless habitat monitoring, spatial issues in ecological modelling, LiDAR feature extraction, ecoinformatics, and open source GIS.

Sarah J. Kupferberg, Ph.D. Visiting Scholar
Ph.D. Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley
skupferberg@berkeley.edu

I study the effects of hydropower facilities on aquatic resources in California rivers. The river breeding Foothill yellow legged frog, Rana boylii is a sentinel species in this effort.  I focus on flow velocity and water temperature as the key abiotic conditions influencing frog populations.  My approach combines field experiments, long term monitoring, and population modeling. The work is supported by the Public Interest Energy Research Program of the California Energy Commission.

I am interested in the relationship between resource flows and food web processes. I am currently engaged in two research projects exploring this topic: 1) the effect of river food webs on river-to-ocean nutrient transport, 2) the impact of seaweed deposition on island food webs.

My research focuses on the transport and effects of chemicals and nutrients through aquatic ecosystems. In particular, I am interested in how chemicals in freshwater systems affect biota locally, how much downstream transport occurs, and what the effects are in the marine environment. To study these questions, I work on pyrethroid pesticides in three rivers in the Monterey Bay area, and Epithemia in the Eel River of California.

My main research interests center on how food webs or ecosystems respond to climate change and changes in disturbance regimes over long time-scales. I have studied diatom frustule abundances in cores sampled from in a deep marine canyon carved at low sea stand off the mouth of the Eel River. These cores record, with annual resolution, 100 years of sediment deposition. During 20 years when algal abundance was surveyed upstream in the modern Eel, the abundances of freshwater diatoms in cores tracked magnitudes of summer algal blooms, which tend to be larger following scouring winter floods. I am using this marine record of freshwater diatoms, as well as marine diatoms, to evaluate how changes in river discharge and marine upwelling over annual and multi-year time scales have affected recent paleo-productivity in this ecosystem.

I am interested in how aquatic food webs interact with terrestrial food webs. Especially, I am interested in how the behavioral traits of aquatic insects influence these interactions. By carefully tracking the movements, life histories and behaviors of significant aquatic insect species, I investigate how life history or behavioral traits affect nutrient fluxes and predators in both in aquatic and terrestrial systems.

I am interested in algal and food web ecology. I want to investigate how interactions and the stoichiometry of algae, bacteria, and invertebrates affect food web structure and nutrient cycling in rivers. Currently I am researching the ecology of cyanobacteria and trying to understand when, where, and why cyanobacteria proliferate in rivers, and how cyanobacteria production moves through the foodweb. I am also involved with the volunteer monitoring group Eel River Recovery Project and am assisting them in the creation of algae monitoring and education programs.

My research interests focus on American dipper (Cinclus mexicanus) ecology, with an emphasis on how their diets and habitat use change with shifts in prey and microhabitat availability due to seasonal or inter-annual hydrologic fluctuations in rivers.. I am also interested in the impacts of dippers on benthic macroinvertebrates, and indirectly, on benthic primary producer assemblages in river food webs.

My interests range from nutrient cycling, trophic linkages, restoration, shifting boundaries, invasion, to climate change implications in aquatic and estuarine food webs. More recently, my research has focused on tracking the movements of benthic invertebrates along the most downstream 13 km of the Eel River, taking into account the penetrating salt wedge (tidal cycle), season, longitude, flow velocity over the river bed, substrate, depth, predators, organic matter, and anthropogenic factors.