Hynes Award for New Investigators
Dr. Daniel Nelson - 2019
Dr. Daniel Nelson is a community and ecosystem ecologist who is broadly interested in the effects of climate change on freshwater ecosystems. He uses a combination of observational and experimental approaches to answer both applied and theoretical questions related to this subject. Daniel first completed his MS at the University of Idaho and then his PhD at the University of Alabama, where he worked with Dr. Jonathan Benstead on a whole-stream warming experiment in southwest Iceland investigating the effects of warming on stream invertebrate communities and food webs. He was selected for the Hynes award based on his publication resulting from this work, which showed that although warming may reassemble invertebrate communities and lower total invertebrate density, it may have a neutral effect on standing biomass due to changes in the size structure of the community: Nelson et al. 2017. Experimental whole-stream warming alters community size structure. Global Change Biology 23: 2618-2628, doi: 10.1111/gcb.13574. Daniel is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in Dr. Dan Allen’s lab at the University of Oklahoma, where he is continuing his studies on the effects of climate change on freshwater ecosystems.