Mary Power on River Ecology, Disturbance, and Inverted Pyramids

RSM River Mechanics Podcast

Dr. Power is a food web ecologist at UC Berkeley, where she leads the Power lab which has compiled careful, long term data sets in the Angelo Reserve in Northern CA.
In addition to her early work, in Panama and the Ozarks - which we touch on briefly - Dr. Power’s multi-decadal data sets on the Eel River, have yielded remarkable findings about how food webs function in gravel bed rivers…and spoiler alert, it sometimes involves the sorts of things we tend to talk about here…like the gravel - and how it transports.
While this is a physical science podcast, I hoped to include interviews with river Ecologists from the beginning particularly ecologists who make careful observations
at that interface of physical and biological processes. And I always hoped I could kick that emphasis off with Dr. Power.
I teach an Ecogeomorphology module in one of our classes here at HEC and I always lead that with the Eel river story she shares About 20 minutes into this episode.
That Eel river story was one of the early influences that got me interested in the ecological interactions with river mechanics processes.
I also asked Mary about a couple of Ecological models and categories, that have corollaries in geomorphology. So we talked about disturbance, alternative stable states as well as the Box model and the Ideal Free Distribution, which are just really helpful ideas for anyone who is interested in rivers.
Dr. Power was induced into the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.
Links:
Serengeti Rules:
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/serengeti-rules-dhbtnm/19906/
Disturbance and Recover of Algal Assemblage on OK Stream
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2425975
Resource Enhancement: Armored Catfish, Algae, and Sediment
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1937361
Episode Photo: Eel River
This series was funded by the Regional Sediment Management (RSM) program.
Stanford Gibson (HEC Sediment Specialist) hosts.
Mike Loretto edited the episode and wrote and performed the music.
Video shorts and other bonus content are available at the podcast website:
https://www.hec.usace.army.mil/confluence/rasdocs/rastraining/latest/the-rsm-river-mechanics-podcast
...but most of the supplementary videos are available on the HEC Sediment YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/stanfordgibson
If you have guest recommendations or feedback you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or ResearchGate or fill out this recommendation and feedback form: https://forms.gle/wWJLVSEYe7S8Cd248