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Postdoctoral researcher


Desert Research Institute, Reno NV


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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Mountain stream ecosystem metabolism and nitrogen cycling responses to hydroclimatic volatility
In Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, 2026.
This research examines how mountain stream ecosystem metabolism and nitrogen cycling respond to dramatic shifts in water availability between drought and exceptionally wet conditions. Using high-frequency measurements from two mountain streams, we found that the transition to a wet year delayed the onset of summer baseflow by approximately 40 days and reduced cumulative primary productivity by more than 90%. Higher and more prolonged streamflow also reduced biological nitrogen demand, shifting streams toward exporting more inorganic nitrogen downstream. Together, these findings demonstrate how changes in the timing and duration of streamflow can strongly influence mountain stream productivity and nutrient cycling.
Main URLResearchGate
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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