FresH2O Zoops: Upscaling our understanding of freshwater planktonic communities’ structure and function

Join ESIIL's FreshH2O Zoops working group for their EDS Seminar on June 16th at 11 am MT! This talk is part of ESIIL's Working Group Showcase taking place on Tuesdays from 11-11:50 am from May 19 to June 30, 2026 where ESIIL's first cohort of working groups will share the story and legacy of their working groups.

Abstract

Despite the critical services freshwater systems provide, freshwater communities have been vastly under-studied compared to terrestrial and marine biomes. In fact, systematic compilations of freshwater zooplankton are surprisingly rare despite the critical roles zooplankton play in regulating and supporting ecosystem services, serving as key indicator species, and consequently, influencing emergent system properties such as water quality and food web structure. We have compiled and harmonized the most temporally and spatially extensive freshwater zooplankton datasets available to date, designed to seamlessly integrate with a suite of in-lake and modeling products. Our team used these core datasets to address four timely questions about freshwater zooplankton dynamics: (1) What metrics of zooplankton community composition can be used as indicators of environmental change across global regions and lake types? (2) How does zooplankton body size structure vary within and among species, and does such variation influence ecosystem function? (3) How do zooplankton dynamics respond to stressors, and can we expect responses to exhibit geospatial trends beyond local and regional scales? (4) Do space-for-time substitutions from multi-lake “snapshot” surveys capture reproducible patterns in temporal zooplankton community dynamics and thus represent valid spatial proxies for species composition trends? Together, we address fundamental questions related to how freshwater communities change worldwide while creating a flexible, reusable data product for continued exploration beyond the scope and duration of this project. 

Speaker Bios

Michael Meyer is a Research Limnologist/Ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, based in Portland, Oregon. Michael earned a PhD in Environmental and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University as well as a Bachelors of Science in Biology, Bachelors of Arts in Russian Studies, and Bachelors of Arts in International Studies at Saint Louis University. Michael was also a Fulbright Research/Study Fellow at the Institute for Biological Research at Irkutsk State University in Siberia and also a State Department Critical Language Scholar at the Institute for Social and Humanitarian Studies in Kazan, Republic of Tatarstan. He describes himself as an interdisciplinary, data-intensive limnologist, who harmonizes disparate data sources to address decades-old limnology questions at large scales.  

Dr. Rachel Pilla is an Aquatic Ecologist in the Environmental Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Her research at ORNL focuses on understanding carbon dynamics in freshwater ecosystems, including gas fluxes in hydropower reservoirs and carbon cycling in stream networks. She is an active member of GLEON and has contributed to several international projects focused on global scale patterns in aquatic ecosystem dynamics and freshwater biodiversity.