November Program and Meeting

Climate Change in Aquatic Systems, presented by Thomas Luhring, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biology at Wichita State University.  

The world is rapidly changing, and organisms are facing novel challenges related to more extreme and variable climates. My research investigates how organisms navigate drought and warming within the context of their ecosystems. I’ll talk about some of my research on giant salamanders and drought in the SE US and finish with some of my grad students’ recent work on intermittent aquatic ecosystems in Kansas.

I grew up in the suburbs of Augusta, GA (Martinez) and played in the small stream bordering our property where I could catch frogs and salamanders (the turtles that filled our aquariums were from the lake across the street). I was on summer camp staff at the local Boy Scout camp (Linwood Hayne) for several years and was in my element teaching nature-themed merit badges. I started undergraduate work at the University of Georgia as a first gen student and thought I had to be a medical doctor because I liked biology. Fortunately, the Institute of Ecology was also at UGA and I eventually found my way there by my junior year. I worked with Golden Mice as an undergraduate researcher with Dr. Gary Barrett and got to do an NSF REU with my eventual MS mentor Dr. Whit Gibbons. During my MS at the Savannah River Ecology Lab, I lived and breathed field work 24-7, sleeping under my desk and spending free time photographing frogs calling at night. I also became moderately obsessed with giant salamanders (Siren lacertina). For my Ph.D., I continued my work on amphibians with Dr. Ray Semlitsch at the University of Missouri investigating the effects of amphibian migrations on the movement of nutrients between aquatic and terrestrial systems. It was also during this time that I became a mediocre birder and spent free time with my buddy and roommate Grant Connette making several trips out to find random birds for our year lists. I still bird, but not nearly as often as I would like. As a postdoc at Michigan State University in the Wagner lab, I worked on a project to manipulate migrations of sea lamprey in Michigan rivers using the smell of dead lamprey. I then joined the DeLong lab at the University of Nebraska to work on questions related to thermal ecology with protists and zooplankton. I finally landed in Wichita Kansas in 2019 and was ready to stop moving (Kansas is my 9^th state of residence). I’ve had several great students that have worked on some excellent projects related to the effects of prior drying on ecosystem function and I’ll share much of that work in my presentation.

The program will available on YouTube the next day