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About the Center for Limnology
Mission of the Center
The mission of the Center for Limnology at CIRES, University of Colorado, Boulder
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, is to promote research and teaching related to inland aquatic ecosystems, including lakes, streams, and wetlands.
Goals of the Center
- to provide visibility and continuity and technical support for interdisciplinary studies involving inland aquatic ecosystems
- to maintain undergraduate training programs and individualized undergraduate instruction in the science of aquatic ecosystems
- to attract and use research funds for the collection and analysis of data on aquatic ecosystems
- 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
- 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.
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Typical Rocky Mountain stream at high elevation (Cache La Poudre River, near the headwaters). The Center has recently studied the fate of organic nitrogen in streams of this type.
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
In 2007, James Anthony completed his doctoral dissertation work on sediment-water exchanges of nitrogen and phosphorus in lakes. One of Dr. Anthony's most important findings was a sharp increase in nutrient flux near the seasonal maximum epilimnetic temperature.
The Center for Limnology continued its long-term study of biogeochemical and metabolic processes in running waters. This work included field studies on spatial and temporal variability in denitrification and also a study of nitrogen ebullition (bubbling). In addition, the Center for Limnology has continued development of a detailed mechanistic system model that has been used in predicting future conditions in the South Platte River.
The Center continues its historical involvement in tropical limnology through preparation of chapters for two books dealing with tropical aquatic environments.
Impacts for 2007-2008 include discoveries related to the effects of climate warming on nutrient fluxes from lake sediments, a greater mechanistic understanding of denitrification, specifically in the South Platte but also generally for running waters, advances in methodologies for quantifying denitrification in running waters, and improvement of water quality in Cherry Creek Reservoir.
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