Hynes Award for New Investigators
Dr. Amanda DelVecchia - 2018
Amanda DelVecchia is an ecosystem ecologist broadly interested in the interactions between biogeochemical and ecological processes in freshwater ecosystems. She is currently a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Scholar working with Dr. Brad Taylor and Dr. Scott Wissinger to understand how climate-change induced shifts in caddisfly populations affect carbon and nutrient transformations in alpine ponds. She received her PhD from the University of Montana having worked with Dr. Jack Stanford at Flathead Lake Biological Station on the role of methane dynamics in supporting ecosystems in shallow alluvial aquifers of river floodplains, most notably the Nyack Floodplain in northwestern Montana. She was selected for the Hynes award based on her publication resulting from this work, which showed the widespread contribution of methane-derived carbon to aquifer consumer biomass and documented the first contribution of millennial-aged methane-derived carbon to secondary consumers in a freshwater system: DelVecchia, Amanda G., Jack A. Stanford, and Xiaomei Xu. "Ancient and Methane-Derived Carbon Subsidizes Contemporary Food Webs." Nature Communications 7 (2016): 13163. She also currently studies patterns of carbon dioxide concentrations and efflux across pond ecosystems, geologic and biological carbon sources and transformations in river aquifer ecosystems, and population genomics of geographically isolated macroinvertebrate populations.