Ryan
McClureHe/His
Ryan McClure a postdoc in the lab of BSE Deputy Directory Stephanie Hampton.
Overview
Ryan McClure grew up in Michigan and spent a lot of time on the water. He moved to Montana in 2008, worked in a Freshwater Ecology lab with Dr. Wyatt Cross, and graduated with a degree in Ecology from Montana State University. Afterward, he worked on the Guppy Project in Trinidad and Tobago. In summer 2015, he joined the Carey Lab at Virginia Tech as a research intern and was a graduate student in the Carey Lab until fall 2020. He was then a dual appointed postdoc with Virginia Tech and the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York. Until recently, he was a postdoc at Washington State University and a NEON Ambassador and is now a postdoc in the lab of BSE Deputy Directory Stephanie Hampton.
Broadly, his research explores how carbon cycling in freshwater lakes and reservoirs are changing as a result of changes in land use and climate. More specifically, I integrate whole ecosystem experiments, modeling, and ecological forecasting to better understand water quality and greenhouse gas emissions from the water surface. A lot of the data from my work is published in the Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) or the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON). When he am not in the lab or field he is trail running, biking, and or kayaking.
Research Interests
Ecological forecasting is an emerging discipline with great promise to improve our understanding of ecological processes and natural resource decision making. The application of near-term, iterative forecasts in ecology is now more critical than ever to address the unnatural pace of environmental change and to make guided decisions for conservation and management, particularly in freshwater lakes and reservoirs. Freshwater lakes and reservoirs globally are increasingly threatened as a result of rapidly changing land use and climate, and some have even posited that these ecosystems are the most threatened on Earth. Therefore, building a community of ecological forecasting practitioners in freshwater ecosystems embodies a culture actively developing and testing hypotheses through forecasts to address current and future patterns in aquatic systems. We are working to develop state of the art forecasts of water temperature in six National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) lakes.
The magnitude and timing of methane diffusion and ebullition emissions from the water surface is difficult to predict along varying spatial and temporal scales. I use time series modeling and manually collected emissions rates along spatial gradients in small freshwater reservoirs to investigate how the drivers of both emission pathways change spatially and temporally in these relatively new anthropogenic freshwater systems. Recently, I have also been developing workflows that forecast future ebullition rates from freshwater reservoir ebullition hotspots. Forecasting has proven to be an effective tool to predict ebullition and more work on this is forthcoming.
Relevant papers:
The magnitude and drivers of methane ebullition and diffusion vary on a longitudinal gradient in a small freshwater reservoir
Whole-ecosystem oxygenation experiments reveal substantially greater hypolimnetic methane concentrations and global warming potential in reservoirs during anoxia. In press at L&O Letters
Dissolved Oxygen (DO) conditions in the bottom waters of lakes and reservoirs are projected to decline in the next century. However, it remains unclear to what extent the depletion of DO also affects the redox chemistry and greenhouse gas production, which has important implications for carbon storage. Using empirical ecosystem-scale studies and modeling, we have manipulated DO into the hypolimnion of a eutrophic reservoir to explore how rapidly changing oxygen conditions also changes alternate biogeochemical pathways and the greenhouse gas efflux phenology.
Relevant papers:
Oxygenation and hydrologic controls on iron and manganese mass budgets in a drinking water reservoir
Metalimnetic oxygen minima alter the vertical profiles of carbon dioxide and methane in a managed freshwater reservoir
Oxygen dynamics control the burial of organic carbon in a eutrophic reservoir