Dr. Erin R. Hotchkiss
Associate Professor | Virginia Tech
Dr. Erin R. Hotchkiss is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and a Faculty Affiliate of the Global Change Center at Virginia Tech. She received her Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of Wyoming, a M.Sc. in Zoology & Physiology from the University of Wyoming, and her B.Sc. from Emory University. Prior to joining Virginia Tech, she conducted postdoctoral research at Umeå University, Sweden and Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada. Hotchkiss was the 2016 recipient of the Society for Freshwater Science’s (SFS) Hynes Award for New Investigators as well as the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography’s (ASLO) Raymond L. Lindeman Award, and became an ASLO Fellow in 2022. Ongoing research in the Hotchkiss Lab explores how environmental change, land-water interactions, and ecosystem processes (e.g., metabolism, nutrient cycling) shape the transport, transformation, and fate of carbon, nutrients, and pollutants in streams, rivers, ponds, and wetlands.
Taking the pulse of inland waters: Opportunities and challenges associated with using dissolved oxygen to monitor the health of freshwater ecosystems
Monitoring the health of our waterways is critical for characterizing ecosystem services and conserving aquatic biodiversity. Ecosystem metabolism, derived from high-frequency dissolved oxygen data, is often used to monitor the health of inland waters by tracking seasonal, event-scale, and management-driven changes in photosynthesis (measured as gross primary production; GPP) and ecosystem respiration (ER). In this talk, I will share how scientists are using estimates of whole-ecosystem metabolism, linked with hydrology and water quality data, to characterize how stream energetics change with land cover and flow regimes across different biomes. I will highlight how whole-stream metabolism responds to and recovers from environmental changes; discuss ongoing challenges with modeling metabolism and linking GPP/ER to some management goals; and identify future opportunities to connect hydrology, biogeochemistry, and ecology to track ecosystem health and resilience in changing environments.