Research

I am an aquatic and global change ecologist working at the interface of ecosystem and community ecology. Broadly, I am interested in the structure and function of ecosystems and how this translates to biological outcomes, particularly in the context of global change. 

Mary Jade Farruggia MJ Farruggia

Assessing ecosystem risk and vulnerability to change

Ecosystems must be comprehensively defined and characterized in order to accurately assess their resilience to global change and determine conservation priorities. Pond ecosystems are hotspots of biodiversity and carbon cycling, globally abundant, and subsidize terrestrial food webs. However, we have lacked both a standard definition of a pond and an understanding of their relative importance in a landscape context. 

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Like ponds, lakes reflect processes within their surrounding catchments and the waters that feed into them. As a result, lakes can act as key sentinels of wider landscape-level changes, making them an ideal study system to quantify climate change impacts.

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Linking global change to ecological mechanism

Wildfire smoke threatens lakes, as it can reflect or scatter sunlight and deposit ash within ecosystems, altering several key physical, chemical, and biological lake processes. We have characterized the effects of wildfire smoke on lakes on several scales, from defining the global scope of impact to investigating mechanisms of change in single ecosystems. 

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Predicting and modeling biological outcomes

A mechanistic understanding of ecosystem drivers and features that determine community assembly and diversity is required to understand conservation priorities and potential outcomes in systems and species at risk. To address this, we have investigated abiotic drivers of change in multiple freshwater communities experiencing the effects of drought, human modification, and warming. 

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