Workshop: Fort Collins, CO; Sept. 11-12, 2019; Understanding Freshwater Ecosystem Change through Analysis of Long-term Samples from Regional U.S. Fish Collections

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Biological research collections are most typically appreciated as resources for taxonomic and evolutionary research and some of these collections may even be made available for public viewing through local or national museums. Regionally focused collections can serve these purposes, but they have an even greater potential to play important roles in long-term, high-impact, ecological and environmental research. This workshop will bring together fish biologists, who, in addition to being researchers, also serve as the custodians of specimens and data in the largest regional fish collections in the U.S. Participants in the workshop will include ecologists who use stable isotopes to understand how environmental change is impacting freshwater aquatic ecosystems and scientists from national ecological monitoring infrastructure and environmental forecasting centers, who manage and interpret long-term datasets on environmental trends. A primary goal of the workshop is to bring together these groups of scientists to understand the practices of each group and then develop a program that will allow the best use of and synthesis for understanding fish response to changing environmental conditions. The ecological and environmental researchers will learn from the fish biologists who curate these collections about sampling and preservation methods of the represented regional fish collections, along with the spatial and temporal breadth of the collections, specimen lot sizes and repetitiveness of sampling, and examples of past research that ecological and environmental researchers have done involving the collections. Participating fish collection curators will learn how isotope geochemistry can be used to understand food web dynamics and ecosystem change. Participants will learn about and explore how stable isotope studies involving specimens from biodiversity collections are performed and issues that must be considered when using these specimens. The wealth of environmental data that can be related to fish-specimen data will also be discussed (e.g., climate, hydrology, land use). Workshop participants will work together to synthesize a program of ecological research involving specimens from regional fish collections.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.