There has been so much going in the field and lab the past few weeks that I have been remiss with updates!  Here is a sampling:

1) A bunch of new papers have come out: check out the Publications page on our website to see our newest work.

2) Congratulations are in order!  Jon successfully passed his qualifying exams, received the Virginia Water Resources Research Grant, *and* received the Lou Bourassa Award from the Virginia Lakes and Watershed Association.  Read a Virginia Tech press release here about his award.  Congrats, Jon!

Alex successfully defended her M.S. in late July and is heading to Colorado to pursue water-themed work out west- we will miss her!

Kate did a stellar job mentoring our REU student Maddie this summer, who was chosen to present her research at NSF during the Council on Undergraduate Research in Arlington this fall!  Well done, Kate & Maddie!

3) We have deployed our brand new weather station at Falling Creek Reservoir- this was a labor of love and supported by funding from the Global Change Center at Virginia Tech.  See the press release and photos here.  As part of a collaboration with Drs. John Little, Maddy Schreiber, and Quinn Thomas, we are using the minute-resolution high-frequency data to conduct ensemble modeling of FCR’s water quality.

4) We conducted not one, but *two* whole-ecosystem experiments at Falling Creek Reservoir this summer, both of epilimnetic mixing and hypolimnetic oxygenation.  SO MUCH SCIENCE!!

5) The Carey Lab hosted a workshop at Virginia Tech on PRAGMA-GLEON distributed computing resources for lake modeling.  As part of the workshop, colleagues Paul Hanson and Renato Figuereido helped us with hourly sampling of our reservoirs to track plankton migration through the night in late June.  Kate and Alex did an amazing job organizing the sampling of >50 response variables on the minute to hourly scale for >36 hours- it was epic. (More photos to come in a future post)

6) We hosted our first annual summer lab retreat, marked by barbecue, whiffleball, and reservoir sampling.

7) In concert with the Reservoir Group, we hosted the International Water Association conference on Lake and Reservoir Management at Mountain Lake August 3-7: everyone in the lab presented a poster and Kate and Zack rocked their oral presentations!

7) Last but not least, Ryan McClure has joined the lab!  Within his first two months, he mixed a lake, oxygenated a lake, helped organize the Midsummer Night’s Dream extravaganza, presented a poster at IWA, and has taken over the FCR sampling from Alex- woohoooo!

8) Finally, Cayelan and Alex are presenting FCR research at ESA this week- come check us out!  Cayelan’s talk is on Wednesday at 9:50 in the Experimental Biogeochemistry session, and Alex’s talk is Friday at 10:30 in the Cross-scale Perspectives session.

More to come… it’s been an awesome, crazy, but wonderful summer.