Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID OR_2025_Tullos

Temporal relationships between aquatic plant production and environmental conditions that drive production

Institute: Oregon
Year Established: 2025 Start Date: 2026-01-01 End Date: 2026-12-31
Total Federal Funds: $15,826 Total Non-Federal Funds: $31,652

Principal Investigators: Desiree Tullos

Project Summary: Aquatic plants and algae are essential to the food web of rivers, but excessive growth can negatively impact the ecosystem and the people that utilize it. Evidence suggests that plant and algae growth are increasing in some areas, but understanding on why the expanded growth is occurring, and how to mitigate it, is limited by our ability to measure these changes and by a lack of high frequency data to document the relevant processes. We aim to address these limitations by extending an existing dataset that documents how plant growth changes over a season and how short-term variations in environmental conditions may drive those changes. Results will support wider monitoring of this essential and understudied aspect of river ecosystems and provide evidence of the role of temporal variability in environmental conditions on seasonal patterns of growth and death of the plants, which can support river management decisions.