CU-Syracuse team to study biocomplexity in Lake Ontario areas

By Roger Segelken

A $3 million biocomplexity grant announced by the National Science Foundation (NSF) will enable a five-year study of how physical, biological and human interactions shape the ecosystems of Lake Ontario's freshwater bays and lagoons. The study will be carried out by a team affiliated with the Cornell Center For the Environment consisting of biologists, engineers and planners from Cornell, the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse and Syracuse University.

The faculty researchers and students at Cornell and Syracuse will be supported by one of 16 grants chosen from 300 proposals to the NSF, to foster a better understanding of the interrelationships that arise when living things at all levels interact with their environment. Two Cornell faculty members also are investigators in a biocomplexity project based at the University of California at San Diego.

"All of us take for granted the predictable patterns in our world, but as scientists we are very poor at explaining how these patterns emerge from our many small and specific studies," said Cornell's Mark B. Bain, leader of the Lake Ontario project. "The connections among numerous processes and pieces that result in familiar environmental patterns are at the center of our work. This is a new, interdisciplinary team testing a new idea in a very complex ecosystem," said Bain, a hydro-ecologist in the New York Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at Cornell who has been dubbed the "sturgeon general" for his studies of that endangered species in the Hudson River.

Other investigators in the Lake Ontario project are Edwin A. Cowen, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell; Charles Driscoll, Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Syracuse University; Stephen Ellner, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell; Nelson Hairston Jr., the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Environmental Science at Cornell; Donald Leopold, professor of environmental and forest biology at the College of Environmental Science and Forestry; Jose Lobo, assistant professor of city and regional planning at Cornell; Daniel P. Loucks, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell; and Rolf J. Pendall, assistant professor of city and regional planning at Cornell.

The biocomplexity grant also will afford research opportunities for students, including fieldwork and laboratory internships for undergraduates and fellowships for doctoral students in multidisciplinary studies at Cornell.

Biocomplexity researchers plan to focus on several embayments along the New York coast of Lake Ontario, including Little Sodus Bay, Port Bay, South and North Sandy Ponds and Fairhaven State Park Pond. The embayments are transitional habitats between the open waters of the lake and the uplands and streams of their drainage basins. They are considered to be typical of the numerous freshwater bays throughout the Great Lakes that are associated with extensive wetlands and human settlements.

The Lake Ontario biocomplexity research plans include:

• Three Cornell investigators and their students will measure and model external processes at the watershed scale to determine water quality and quantity entering embayments. They are to develop watershed hydrologic-simulation capabilities, model land use and land cover, and develop a hydrodynamic simulator to model water exchange between Lake Ontario and the bay ecosystems.
• Investigators at Cornell and Syracuse universities and their students will examine internal ecosystem processes, which can change as often as weekly, by measuring plankton, pelagic fish populations, water quality and water mixing.
• Investigators at Cornell and the College of Environmental Science and Forestry and their students will study the internal ecosystem properties that change seasonally, such as fish community composition, littoral invertebrates, aquatic plants and wetland flora.
• College of Environmental Science and Forestry and Cornell investigators and their students also will study internal system properties that change over longer time scales, using historical patterns of human settlements and vegetation distributions.
• Finally, all data and model simulations will be integrated mathematically to determine the conditions that allow self-organization of ecosystems and the effects on ecosystems from external factors.

In addition, two Cornell physicists have a $700,000 project within a $3 million award to University of California at San Diego. Eberhard Bodenschatz, associate professor of physics, and Michelle Wang, assistant professor of physics, will attempt to characterize the development of Dictyostelium, a multicellular organism better known as a slime mold. The San Diego-Cornell project is expected to provide scientists with a greater understanding of one of the central problems of modern biology: how to form an integrated picture of an organism that connects genetic information to its behavioral responses.