UGA Today: People are altering decomposition rates in waterways


A woman wearing a blue and orange puffy vest with a black shirt smiles as she looks at a small glass box containing an aquatic specimen. Three students gather around to look closely at it. In the background, sunlight filters through green tree canopy.

Dr. Krista Capps was recently featured by UGA Today for her work exploring decomposition rates in rivers around the world.

In a recent paper, Capps and collaborators at UGA, Oakland University and Kent State University collected field data from over 150 researchers in 40 countries, putting together an evaluation that included 550 rivers across the globe. This study is the first to combine a global experiment with predictive modeling, and illustrates how human impacts to waterways make contribute to climate change.

“Everyone in the world needs water,” said Capps, associate professor in UGA’s Odum School of Ecology  and Savannah River Ecology Laboratory. “When human activities change the fundamental ways rivers work, it’s concerning. Increases in decomposition rates may be problematic for the global carbon cycle and for animals, like insects and fish, that live in streams because the food resources they need to survive will disappear more quickly, lost to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.”

Read the full article here.