Stephen B. Baines, Associate Professor (CV) Ph.D., Yale University, 1993 Aquatic ecosystem ecology, ecological stoichiometry Email: Stephen.Baines@stonybrook.edu Office: LS636 Phone: (631)632-1092 Lab Website: Baines Lab Website |
Research Summary:
I am an ecosystem ecologist interested in how organism characteristics, ecological
processes and factor acting over regional scales combine to shape aquatic biogeochemical
cycles that involve carbon and trace elements. My current research foci can be divided
into three areas.
First, I try to understand variability in the elemental composition of microscopic
organisms that form the base of open water food webs - namely phytoplankton, bacteria
and protozoa -- and how this variability may also influence nutrient cycles or the
transfer of contaminant elements through food-webs. I do so with field and laboratory
experiments using radioisotopes, biokinetic modeling of contaminant accumulation by
organisms, ecological stoichiometric modeling of food-web and recycling dynamics and
X-ray fluorescence microscopic measurements of the elemental content of individual
plankton cells collected from nature.
Second, I study how the use of dissolved organic matter (DOM) as an energetic subsidy
by aquatic consumer organisms can allow them to sidestep the negative feed-backs that
typically occur in predator-prey systems, potentially leading to persistent reductions
in the resource base upon which other consumer organisms depend. Because many toxic
trace elements form complexes with dissolved organic matter, uptake of DOM by organisms
also exposes them to contaminant metals and alters the movement of these contaminants
through aquatic ecosystems. I am interested in how "bioavailability" of DOM varies
over space and time, the sources of bioavailable fractions, and how the characteristics
of the surrounding landscape may affect the susceptibility of lakes and rivers to
transformative change by invasive organisms.
Finally, I use statistical analysis of long-term data sets to determine the degree
to which the dynamics of neighboring ecosystems are synchronized by regional climate.
This approach allows me to gauge the relative importance of extrinsic forces, local
context and intrinsic dynamics as drivers of ecosystem variables. This question is
important not only for the interpretation of long-term ecological data, but also generally
in the effective monitoring and management of lakes, rivers and coastal embayments.