Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

About the Center for Limnology

Mission of the Center

The mission of the Center for Limnology at CIRES, University of Colorado, Boulder [ About CU ] , is to promote research and teaching related to inland aquatic ecosystems, including lakes, streams, and wetlands.

Goals of the Center

1. to provide visibility and continuity and technical support for interdisciplinary studies involving inland aquatic ecosystems
2. to maintain undergraduate training programs and individualized undergraduate instruction in the science of aquatic ecosystems
3. to attract and use research funds for the collection and analysis of data on aquatic ecosystems
4. to publish and disseminate research findings in the open literature and to participate at the national and international level in the study of important questions relating to aquatic ecosystems
5. to help resolve important problems related to either the basic science or applied science of inland waters

Description of Center Activities

The Center for Limnology has three types of programs, each of which has teaching and research components. The first of these is the study of inland waters at tropical latitudes. The Center is well known for research, publication, and collaborative work in the study of tropical inland waters. Tropical inland waters are much less thoroughly known than waters of temperate latitudes. Studies of tropical waters are motivated in part by the great value of testing theories derived at temperate latitudes by making comparisons across latitudes where basic physical conditions are different. In addition, tropical latitudes offer the opportunity to study certain types of environments, such as floodplains, in pristine condition, where such opportunities are much rarer at temperate latitudes. Finally, resource exploitation in the tropics can be beneficially guided by insight into basic mechanisms that function in tropical aquatic ecosystems. The Orinoco River Basin has been a site of particular interest and activity for the Center for Limnology.

The Center for Limnology is extensively involved in studies of aquatic ecosystems in the Rocky Mountain West. Current or recent studies have involved the use of stable isotopes to test hypotheses about energy sources for stream foodwebs, for example. Another current project, which is made possible by the presence of aquatic environments receiving minimal amounts of anthropogenic fixed nitrogen from the atmosphere, involves the testing of hypotheses about the role of organic nitrogen in sustaining microbial activity in waters that have not been anthropogenically enriched with nitrogen. Numerous other projects involving biogeochemistry, water quality, and aquatic life are in various stages of completion in the Rockies under support from the Center.

One final area of emphasis is global biogeochemical cycling. In collaboration with others (e.g., through the international SCOPE Nitrogen Project), the Center has allocated considerable effort on analyses of the global nitrogen cycle. For example, the Center used its experience with tropical inland waters to analyze nitrogen output from tropical land masses under pristine conditions, and is currently working on a global budget for nitrogen export from watersheds under predisturbance conditions.

Center Collaborations

The Center for Limnology collaborates extensively with other research groups. Collaborators on campus include the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research and faculty from the Geography and Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering departments. Off campus collaborations include the SCOPE N committee, the Universidad Central de Venezuela, and the International Institute of Tropical Forestry in Puerto Rico.

Accomplishments »