Impact of Corbicula fluminae (Asian clam) on particulate matter transport in an urban stream.

Wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) effluent is a significant source of anthropogenic N loading to urban streams and has been shown to impact the ability of streams to provide ecosystem services of nutrient retention and denitrification. If a stream is unable to provide these services, then the downstream systems will receive higher N loads potentially causing eutrophication and reduction of biodiversity. Corbicula fluminae (Asian clam) is an invasive species that has been shown to filter feed at a very high rate. I hypothesized that Corbicula functions to remove anthropogenic N at a sufficient rate to impact suspended particulate matter (seston) dynamics in a stream receiving treated urban wastewater. Stable isotope analysis was used as a tool to evaluate trophic relationships between seston and Corbicula. Fieldwork was conducted on North Buffalo Creek , NC, USA. Two laboratory experiments were performed to evaluate Corbicula filtering rate both in the presence and absence of stream sediment. Ash free dry mass (AFDM), ä15N, ä13C, C/N ratio, and chlorophyll a were measured over the course of 12 h in order to determine Corbicula impact on these seston variables over time. Field and experimental results showed that Corbicula in North Buffalo Creek was not filtering as has been described previously. My results indicate that Corbicula pedal feeds in the sediment. Therefore, instead of providing an ecosystem service of removing sewage-derived N from the water column, Corbicula returns sediment bound nutrients to the water column, thereby contributing further to downstream eutrophication

Q&A with Allison Carruth

Professor Allison Carruth recentlyjoined the faculty of the Department of English at UCLA. She is also an affiliated faculty member at the Center for theStudy of Women and at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Last year, she served as a respondent at CSW’s “Life (Un)Ltd” symposium on May 11, 2012. She is currently working with CSW Interim Director Rachel Lee on organizing “The Politics of Seeds,” a symposium that will take place on May17, 2013. She kindly agreed to talk with us about her research and the upcoming symposium

Ecological Media Studies and the Matter of Digital Technologies

In 2009 william pannapacker pronounced the digital humanities to be “the first ‘next big thing’ in a longtime” promising to reconfigure and reinvigorate the humanities. The same could now plausibly be said about the environmental humanities with the recent rise of dedicated academic centers (at, e.g., KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in Sweden; Princeton University; the University of California, Santa Barbara; and the University of Utah), grant-funded projects (like the Sawyer Seminar on the Environmental Humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the consortium Humanities for the Environment), and faculty positions. If the digital and environmental humanities have been ascendant amid what Christopher Newfield describes as the “unmaking” of public higher education and what Richard Grusin terms the “crisis humanities,” such an assessment invites the question of whether the ecological digital humanities (EcoDH) might serve to combine the most saleable facets of the digital humanities and the environmental humanities for university stakeholders who promote applied humanities work outside academia or, alternatively, a hybrid method for researching, teaching, and designing cultural responses to structures of ecological and social precarity (Grusin 80)

Q&A with Allison Carruth

Professor Allison Carruth recentlyjoined the faculty of the Department of English at UCLA. She is also an affiliated faculty member at the Center for theStudy of Women and at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. Last year, she served as a respondent at CSW’s “Life (Un)Ltd” symposium on May 11, 2012. She is currently working with CSW Interim Director Rachel Lee on organizing “The Politics of Seeds,” a symposium that will take place on May17, 2013. She kindly agreed to talk with us about her research and the upcoming symposium