C. Emi Fergus
Agriculture and urban development are prominent features in the landscape and natural land cover will continue to be converted to accommodate expanding populations and economic growth. These land use disturbances have implications for ecosystem integrity and functioning, and aquatic ecosystems may be especially vulnerable to disturbances because of their strong hydrological connectivity to the surrounding landscape. My research interests lie in applying the principles of landscape ecology to study ecosystem integrity and functions in freshwater environments impacted by anthropogenic disturbances such as land use change and global climate change. These interests fit in the emerging field of landscape limnology. I find this landscape limnology approach attractive because it utilizes digital geographic information technology, which is becoming widely available, to address broad scale ecological processes that are likely overlooked in more traditional aquatic studies. I believe that understanding these relationships will become important in understanding the consequences of a changing landscape and can inform management and conservation of aquatic resources.
I am part of MSU's Landscape Limnology Research Group. My masters research is studying the influence of wetlands in the landscape on lake phosphorus concentrations, a nutrient of concern to lake water quality, and how this relationship changes in undisturbed and land use disturbed settings. To study the effects of disturbance on wetland/lake phosphorus dynamics I employed two approaches to characterize the undisturbed landscape. I first took a historical approach and utilized presetttlement digital land cover maps, reconstructed by the Michigan Natural Features Inventory from early 1800s Public Land Office Surveys, to quantify wetlands in the landscape. My second approach was to substitute space for time and select present day lake catchments with minimal agricultural and urban land use to be treated as undisturbed landscapes. I will be testing a variety of wetland spatial metrics as predictors of lake phosphorus in undisturbed and disturbed catchments to determine whether wetland location is significant to nutrient processes and export to lake bodies.
Future Research:
Developing novel freshwater landscape metrics
The preliminary results from my master’s thesis have sparked interest in further exploring the interactions and spatial connectivity of freshwater ecosystems. I am interested in developing spatially explicit landscape metrics for freshwater ecosystems to predict lake nutrient and organic carbon concentrations. I hypothesize that human disturbances will be important drivers of freshwater ecosystem functional roles in nutrient processes and will explicitly consider their effects from a landscape level. My future dissertation research will focus on these themes and will incorporate environmental modeling and novel spatial processing techniques.
Personal Interests
In my free time I enjoy spending time outdoors doing activities such as jogging, kayaking or cross country skiing depending on the time of the year. Over the past two years I have made the annual pilgrimage to Point Pelee, Ontario to welcome the incoming migratory song birds. Although my bird identification skills are rather poor I hope to be more actively involved in the local Audubon Society.
Contact Information
Department of Fisheries and Wildlife
161 Natural Resources Building
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824
(517) 353-3234
fergusca@msu.edu
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