Castle Lake Limnology Research Station

As part of the new UC Davis UNR collaborative research effort at Castle Lake, the Castle Lake Long-term Research Program is being expanded. The primary goals of this expansion are to:

• Develop a basin scale approach to the long-term monitoring program at Castle Lake, taking a landscape level perspective on the physical, chemical, and biological ecosystem components as well as their drivers, and interactions.
• Expand food-web research and monitoring to encompass multiscale connectivity and temporal dynamics and subsidies across the aqua-terrestrial ecotone.
• Explore and track the effects of climate change on the basin and its ecology.
• Combine historic data from the long-term monitoring with this new expanded data set in a series of models (ecologic/ food-web, air/water quality, and climatologic) to serve as an active data repository supporting a new degree of focus in Castle Lake research and discovery.

To help flesh out the details, processes and methodologies underlying these goals, in the spirit of this new bi-university collaboration, Dr. Goldman and Dr. Chandra hosted parallel field seminars at their respective institutions during the fall quarter of 2006 focused on food-webs from a landscape perspective (discussion topics and references from these courses are available on the Castle Lake website http://castlelake.ucdavis.edu/). The parallel discussions in the two courses culminated in a joint field trip in early November 2006 where the two groups met, discussed their developing ideas, and joined forces in a whole lake food-web sampling. Dr. Goldman and Dr. Chandra plan to begin implementation of this expanded long-term research effort during the summer 2007 field season.