Chase Rakowski
I am a postdoc in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Mountain Limnology Lab. I study community and ecosystem ecology, mostly using small freshwater organisms as study systems, and investigating questions spanning basic and applied science. My approaches include field and laboratory experiments, theory, and analysis of monitoring data.
I have several ongoing projects which aim to elucidate species interactions and their consequences for how ecosystems function. Most recently I began working with an international group of scientists to analyze plankton monitoring data from lakes around the world. We hope to better understand how zooplankton might be used as indicators of ecosystem functioning and environmental change, as well as better understand relationships between freshwater zooplankton and phytoplankton across space and time.
Some other ongoing projects center around understanding emergent species interactions. Most community ecology theory is based on two-species interaction models, but real communities are rife with emergent interactions that these pairwise relationships fail to predict. Furthermore, we don’t yet understand how these emergent interactions (AKA higher order interactions) might change under different environmental conditions. I am approaching this question using experiments with the humble duckweeds. Also, I am working on a guide for designing such experiments, and a computer vision model for processing duckweed photos. Find out more in Projects.
