Athens, Ga. – The 28th annual Eugene P. Odum Lecture at the University of Georgia will be given by Mary E. Power of the University of California, Berkeley. Her talk on “Food Webs in River Networks: Algal-Mediated Linkages of Rivers, Uplands and Oceans” will be held March 5 at 4 p.m. in the Odum School of Ecology’s auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Power, a professor of integrative biology, studies food webs in temperate and tropical rivers, with a focus on how environmental conditions and species interactions affect food web dynamics and structure. She writes that she and her collaborators “seek insights that will help forecast how river-structured ecosystems will respond to watershed or regional scale changes in climate, land use or biota.”
“It’s an honor to have Mary Power give the Odum lecture,” said John Gittleman, dean of the Odum School. “Her research is timely and cutting edge, providing important insights about how, when and in what manner ecosystems are being altered by climate change and other ecological drivers. We always look forward to the annual Odum Lecture because it both showcases the critical need for ecological research as well as forecasts the future of ecological problems.”
Much of Power’s fieldwork is carried out in the South Fork Eel River, located within the Angelo Coast Range Reserve where she serves as faculty director. This 8,000-acre protected area is one of 38 teaching and research sites in the University of California Natural Reserve System.
Power is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a past president of both the Ecological Society of America and the American Society of Naturalists. She has received numerous honors and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Medal from the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography.
Honoring the founder of the Odum School of Ecology, the annual Eugene P. Odum Lecture Series features speakers who address significant ecological questions in broad social and intellectual contexts. The 27 previous Odum Lectures have been delivered by many leading scholars-including ecologists Thomas Schoener and Stephen Pacala, biologists Gretchen Daily and Jim Brown, botanist Peter Raven, conservation ecologist Thomas Lovejoy and then-director of the National Science Foundation Rita Colwell.
The Odum Lecture is supported in part by funding from the Eugene P. and William E. Odum Endowment.
