Albert Ruhi
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Ecology & Evolution·Early-career
Droughts are becoming more frequent, longer and more severe in many regions. When streams that usually flow all year dry into disconnected pools, whole sections of a river network can be cut off.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
drought
intermittent streams
river networks
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Identify what controls metacommunity stability in streams, focusing on drought-driven dispersal limits and population synchrony, using long-term monitoring and field experiments in an intermittent river network in Pinnacles National Park.
- Determine whether recent climatic droughts, alone or combined with human activities, synchronized stream flow regimes within and across U.S. river networks, using time-series analysis of hydrology data.
- Forecast the vulnerability of U.S. stream invertebrates and fishes to future droughts by modeling local temperature and flow change together with network-wide shifts in habitat and connectivity.
More about the research
Populations of aquatic animals across wide areas may also rise and fall in sync. Synchronized populations are riskier, because they can all crash at once. It is still unclear how this isolation and synchrony endanger species, either directly or by changing how species interact. Predicting the responses of whole food webs and metacommunities (sets of local communities linked by dispersal) remains especially hard.
Why it matters
By estimating which stream invertebrates and fishes are most at risk as droughts intensify, this work could help quantify the danger of freshwater biodiversity loss under a more variable climate. Conservation practitioners and water managers could use the results to design environmental flows and target habitat restoration in river networks.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Christopher Swan
University of Maryland-Baltimore County, MD·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether demographic stochasticity, random variation in births, deaths and local extinctions, shapes community assembly more strongly in tropical streams than temperate ones, given temperature-dependent differences in population growth rates and densities.
Jonathan Walter
University of California-Davis, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Test how plant functional traits, the physical, physiological and seasonal features of species, influence population and community synchrony, using multi-site time series from the global Nutrient Network grassland experiment.
Jonathan Czuba
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether fine sediment accumulation in streambeds can be predicted from bankfull flow conditions across a wide range of U.S. landscapes, by analyzing a U.S. EPA stream dataset.
The school
University of California-Berkeley: 46 labs on PI Pages, $1.1B a year on research, 825 research doctorates a year.
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