HR: 09:00h
AN: H21I-04    [Abstracts]
TI: Ecohydrological Modeling of Food Webs in Stream Ecosystems
AU: * Abdul-Aziz, O I
EM: abdu0110@umn.edu
AF: Graduate Student, Civil Engieering, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities., Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory 2 Third Avenue SE, Minneapolis, MN 55414, United States
AU: Wilson, B N
EM: wilson@umn.edu
AF: Professor, Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities., 1390 Eckles Avenue, Saint Paul, MN 55108, United States
AU: Gulliver, J S
EM: gulli003@umn.edu
AF: Joseph T. and Rose S. Ling Professor, Civil Engineering, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities., 500 Pillsbury Drive SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455, United States
AB: Dynamic biological processes in streams and rivers are essential aspects of ecohydrology. Numerical modeling of river food webs provides a useful vehicle for gaining insights into the scaling, self-organization and critical responses of these biological processes. Existing modeling literature is mostly limited to food webs with two or three trophic levels applied to marine or lake ecosystems. However, river ecosystems are distinctively different. They have a characteristic shorter residence time. Natural drivers (e.g., watershed and channel hydrology and geomorphology) as well as direct anthropogenic activities in rivers (e.g., building dams and reservoirs) play a vital role in shaping river food webs. Of particular interests are the benthic and non-benthic zones that have different physical, chemical and biological compositions. The authors developed food web models to capture the long- term dynamics of the total as well as that of the benthic and non-benthic zones in an interactive manner by emphasizing hydrologic drivers along with other environmental and geomorphologic constraints. These models are applied to several floodplain streams and rivers in Minnesota.
DE: 0439 Ecosystems, structure and dynamics (4815)
DE: 0496 Water quality
DE: 1813 Eco-hydrology
DE: 1847 Modeling
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting