Aquatic Methane at Small and Large Scales

As part of the Water Institute's WaterTalks lecture series, Emily Stanley, professor in the Department of Integrative Biology and Center for Limnology at the University of Wisconsin Madison, presents, "Aquatic Methane at Small and Large Scales ."

Light refreshments will be provided.

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Studies of carbon cycling within aquatic environments, and understanding of the significance of aquatic ecosystems in larger-scale carbon balances have increased exponentially in the past two decades. It has become increasingly clear that inland surface waters (lakes, reservoirs, streams and rivers) are active transformers of carbon that make disproportionately large contributions to atmospheric greenhouse gas pools. It is also becoming apparent that human activities strongly influence carbon cycling within individual ecosystems, affecting the contribution of these systems to regional and global carbon cycles.

This talk will consider examples of human influences on aquatic carbon cycling in agricultural and urban landscapes, focusing on dynamics of methane. This includes: where and how much of this potent greenhouse gas is present in lakes and streams, how these patterns may be influenced by human activities within individual ecosystems and at the global scale, and future research and management opportunities and priorities.

Speaker bio

Emily Stanley is a professor in the Department of Integrative Biology and Center for Limnology at the University of Wisconsin Madison. She received her B.S. degree from Yale University and PhD from Arizona State University. Stanley’s research group investigates biogeochemistry and ecosystem processes in streams and lakes, and how they are affected by human and physical drivers. She is the lead PI of the North Temperate Lakes Long-Term Ecological Research program, and is also involved in projects examining long-term and large-scale dynamics in lakes and streams.

She is an author on over 100 peer-review articles, has served on the editorial boards of Journal of Geophysical Research, Marine and Freshwater Research, and Ecological Applications, and is a senior editor for ASLO’s new journal, Limnology and Oceanography Letters. Stanley was named an Aldo Leopold Fellow in 2006 and received ASLO’s G.E. Hutchinson award in 2018 in recognition of her outstanding and synthetic contributions to our understanding of the roles of hydrology and the biogeochemistry of nitrogen and carbon in lake and stream ecology.