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Ph.D. Candidate

University of Nevada Reno
Blaszczak Watershed and Aquatic Ecosystem Ecology Lab

kellyloria at gmail.com

Aquatic ecosystems integrate large scale climatological phenomena (e.g., warming and changing precipitation regimes) alongside catchment scale characteristics (e.g. nutrient and organic matter availability, land use, and evaporative demand) in ways that can alter aspects of aquatic ecosystem function (e.g. carbon cycling and energy fluxes, biogeochemical nutrient transport and transportation) that have important implications for future water and habitat quality.

I’m interested in evaluating temporal variation in aquatic ecosystem function to better understand how streams and lakes respond to multiple stressors. My work has involved a combination of high-frequency sensor deployments in streams and lakes, benthic stream and lake surveys, as well as time series, causal, and statistical modeling.

Publications

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The influence of mountain streamflow on nearshore ecosystem metabolism in a large, oligotrophic lake across a drought and a wet year
In Limnology and Oceanography, 2025.
This work examines how streamflow influences nearshore productivity in Lake Tahoe under contrasting wet and dry years, focusing on shorelines with varying inflow levels. By evaluating streamflow for shores with large, small, or no stream inflows (four locations across two shores) during two contrasting water years (one drought and one wet), this work showed how streamflow reduces water temperature, light availability, to indirectly influence nearshore metabolism in ways that varied with inflow size. This work underscores how oligotrophic littoral productivity varies across shorelines and in response to hydrological conditions, with streamflow and precipitation exerting contrasting effects on metabolism depending on the proximity to inflowing streams.
Main URLResearchGate
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On thin ice: Linking elevation and long-term losses of lake ice cover
In Limnology and Oceanography Letters, 2021.
Using a 36‐yr dataset (1983–2018) on alpine lakes (> 3000 m ASL) from the Green Lakes Valley, Colorado (GLV), we found that ice‐cover duration decreased by an average of ~ 24 d, due to both earlier ice‐off (9 d) and especially later ice‐on (15 d). Spring ice thickness also decreased by 0.88 cm yr−1. By comparison, ice‐cover duration in the GLV is decreasing ~ 50% faster than for Northern Hemisphere lakes (n = 215), which translates to an increase in open water duration ~ 2.5 times more in the GLV than the average of the Northern Hemisphere. Our analytical comparison demonstrated more rapid trends in this alpine region compared to lakes more broadly, and especially emphasized the influence of elevation on lake ice phenology.
Main URLResearchGate