Hello all - This is to announce a special session at this year's NABS ASLO meeting (june 6-10 Santa Fe NM) on using stable isotope tracer additions to quantify food web flows in stream ecosystems (full description appended at the end of this email). Despite the word "stream" in the title, we are interested in a multidisciplinary perspective on using these techniques to quantify trophic flows. We encourage submissions from broad habitats and those that involve coupled tracers and theoretical analyses. Abstracts are due on Feb 12 2010. Hope to see you there!
Please feel free to contact me ([email protected]) should you have any questions. The meeting website is here http://www.aslo.org/santafe2010. Thank you! Rana El-Sabaawi (on behalf of the session organizers). S49: USING ISOTOPE TRACER ADDITIONS TO QUANTIFY FOOD WEB FLOWS IN STREAM ECOSYSTEMS Organizers: Rana El-Sabaawi, Cornell University, [email protected]; Alex Flecker, Cornell University, [email protected] and Steve Thomas, University of Nebraska - Lincoln,[email protected] The use of whole-stream isotope additions has greatly improved our estimates of biogeochemical transformations such as nitrification, denitrification and ammonium uptake. These techniques have facilitated the ability to compare biogeochemical processes across many types of stream ecosystems, and have led to several cross-system syntheses of nitrogen dynamics. Tracer additions have also been used to measure how food web fluxes respond to various environmental and biological factors, but the development and synthesis of tracer-generated models of food web structure and function have lagged behind measurements of biogeochemical processes. The goal of this session is to provide a forum for researchers to synthesize tracer-generated food web models and identify future needs and directions for these analyses. Invited and submitted talks will address case studies highlighting how tracer additions have been used to answer food web-related questions and identify technical challenges of modeling food webs based on isotope tracer data. A further goal of this session will be to investigate how food web theory can be coupled with tracer techniques to generate comprehensive food web models of lotic ecosystems. This session aims to galvanize and coordinate efforts that compare patterns of food web dynamics and trophic connections across diverse systems.
