Study sites, tools and expertise

Study sites:

Within 100 miles of New Haven, we have access to hundreds of lakes, rivers, wetlands and streams, a handful of major east coast rivers and associated estuaries, Long Island Sound, and a myriad of coastal ecosystems. We also have contacts for, or experience in lakes in New York (including the Adirondacks), the upper Midwest (northern Wisconsin and Michigan), and New Hampshire, the Hudson River, and wetlands along the Rio Grande in central New Mexico. Over the past few years we have started new projects in many of the lakes and streams in Connecticut.

Tools and expertise:

Researchers in the Post Lab will have the ability to develop and apply innovative stable isotope techniques to a wide range of ecological questions. The Post Lab is part of the YIBS Earth Systems Center for Stable Isotopic Studies -- an interdisciplinary, state of the art stable isotope laboratory located in the Environmental Science Center. This YIBS research center works to enhance interaction among ecologists, evolutionary biologists, paleobiologists, and isotope geochemists, and provides an exciting and stimulating environment for the development and applications of stable isotope techniques to a broad range of ecological questions.

Members of the Post Lab also have the tools and expertise to work on:

1) Empirical and theoretical analyses of food webs in aquatic and terrestrial systems

2) General questions in fish ecology, including fish recruitment and population dynamics, growth and survival of larval and juvenile fish, otolith analysis, interactions between fish population dynamics and food web structure, size-structured predator-prey interactions, and dietary analyses

3) General questions in zooplankton ecology, including community structure, population dynamics of major grazers, predator-prey interactions, and the interaction between organism traits (e.g., grazer performance) and ecosystem processes (e.g., primary production)

4) Time-series analyses of ecological processes

5) Theoretical modeling

6) Nutrient cycling, including nutrient stoichiometry and questions related to cultural eutrophication and non-point pollution

7) Application of stable isotope analyses to food web ecology, nutrient cycling, and carbon flow into and through aquatic ecosystems

8) Analysis of aquatic landscapes

9) Whole ecosystem experimentation, working in both lakes and streams in the northeast