PhD student Lyndsie Collis, advised by Jim Hood, has two new first author publications in recent months. 

The first of these papers was part of a large NSF-funded study that examined Icelandic geothermal streams to understand how stream ecosystems may respond to future climate change and eutrophication scenarios. Much of this work was completed while Lyndsie pursued her master's degree at the AEL. In the study, they conducted three stream-side channel experiments which created "mini streams" across gradients of temperature, nitrogen, and phosphorus availability to see how stream biofilms responded to the interactive effects of warming and nutrients. 

Temperature and nitrogen availability interact to shape N‐acquisition pathways and metabolism in stream biofilms
Lyndsie M. Collis, Jonathan P. Benstead, Wyatt F. Cross, Alexander D. Huryn, Jill R. Welter, Paula C. Furey, Philip W. Johnson, Gísli M. Gíslason, Jón S. Ólafsson, James M. Hood
Ecological Monographs, e70028 | First Published: 17 August 2025 | doi.org/10.1002/ecm.70028 

The second paper was part of Lyndsie's PhD research in which she advised an undergraduate thesis student, Dan Peters. Lyndsie and Dan share first authorship for this paper about zooplankton grazing experiments in western Lake Erie in 2021. Recent AEL alumna Morgan Shaw also helped to carry out these experiments as she began pursuing her master's degree with Jim Hood. In this study, they characterized zooplankton diets during the cyanobacterial harmful algal bloom (cHAB) in order to understand how zooplankton influence cHABs, but also how energy flows from the cHAB to zooplankton. This work was part of a larger collaboration between AEL researchers, colleagues at the Ohio Division of Wildlife, and NOAA-GLERL.

Mesozooplankton grazing patterns and preferences during a cyanobacterial harmful algal bloom (cHAB) in a large eutrophic lake.
Daniel Peters, Lyndsie Collis, Morgan Shaw, Zak Slagle, Henry Vanderploeg, & James Hood
Harmful Algae, Volume 150, 102963 | doi.org/10.1016/j.hal.2025.102963