IRIS Associate Director of Education, Equity, and Inclusion; Professor, Odum School of Ecology
Amy Rosemond is a professor of ecology in the Odum School of Ecology at UGA and a fellow of the Ecological Society of America. Her research program has been motivated by society’s need for healthy, resilient freshwater ecosystems and the goods and services they provide. The work in her lab has been aimed at identifying the factors that maintain, diminish or improve the health of aquatic ecosystems.
The lab has been successful at identifying mechanistic understandings of aquatic ecosystem functions and how they change due to stressors like excess nutrients, temperature and other non-point source pollutants. She has collaborated with others to conduct ecosystem-scale experimental manipulations, to establish landscape-scale patterns in stream health due to watershed urbanization, and to quantify the effects of flow variability, temperature, and nutrients on aquatic organisms and ecosystem functions. Rosemond has explored the effects of excess nutrients as a leading source of impairment to streams, focusing on nutrient effects on terrestrially-derived detritus and associated food webs pathways. Detritus is a critical component supporting stream ecosystem functions and has been understudied relative to nutrient effects on algal pathways; this work was recently the topic of an US EPA webinar.
Current studies are focused on how elevated temperature affects carbon processing and stream organisms. Her research has shown that the services that society needs from fresh water are consistent with maintaining conditions that support a diversity of plant and animal life. Future collaborative work will be aimed at identifying specific management solutions that provide for the needs of both humans and thriving aquatic ecosystems.