Nicole Ramberg Pihl

A2C2 IGERT Graduate Fellow

Research Area:

I am interested in freshwater community ecology!  Specifically, I enjoy studying how species interactions within food webs influence the behavior, distribution, and community composition of aquatic organisms.  On a broader scale, I am interested in how environmental factors such as climate and anthropogenic forces can alter freshwater systems.

As a PhD student at the University of Maine, I will be examining the effects of abrupt changes in climate, such as periods of drying and/or flooding, on macroinvertebrate communities and the range expansion of warmwater fish species.  Furthermore, I am seeking to understand what the results of this work could mean for populations of endangered Atlantic salmon in the Gulf of Maine.

For my Master’s research, I studied the predator-prey relationship between crayfish and Smallmouth bass in lakes of central New Hampshire to determine how the presence of predatory species could influence behavior and distribution of prey species.  This involved various aspects of chemical ecology in predator-prey systems and studying multiple populations to determine the role of learning to increase survival.

All in all I have a passion for science, whether it be fieldwork or teasing apart the intricacies of my research systems in the lab!