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Research
Interests:
David
Lin is a doctoral student with Prof.
Julie Brock. His research interests include marine community
ecology, food webs, stable isotopes, and mermaids. Dave also thinks
deserts, Anolis lizards and marine plants are really neat. His undergraduate
research theses at UCLA (under the mentorship of
Prof. Peggy Fong) focused on assessing nutrient enrichment from
shrimp farming in French Polynesia and Panama using stable isotopes.
Dave's
research aims to address the following questions: (1) How do bottom-up
(resource-driven) and top-down (consumer-driven) forces interact
to regulate food web structure, dynamics and community biodiversity?
(2) How do such changes in biodiversity affect ecosystem functioning?
and lastly (3) How can stable isotope techniques be applied to answer
such ecological questions?
Dave's current work examines changes in benthic food web structure
resulting from commercial fish farming off southern O'ahu. This
open-ocean farm features several large submerged cages raising moi
(Pacific threadfin, Polydactylus sexfilis) for human consumption.
Organic enrichment--in the form of fish feces, uneaten food pellets
and cage debris--impacts the seafloor beneath the fish cages. Dave
is employing stable isotope techniques (15N & 13C) to assess
the relative importance of bottom-up resource additions in regulating
benthic food web structure and dynamics. He is also working with
Prof.
Brian Popp (UH Dept. of Geology & Geophysics) to study ecosystem
functioning under the fish farm following changes in benthic biodiversity.
Current
research is funded by the NOAA Hawai'i Offshore Aquaculture Project
(HOARP) and an EPA STAR graduate fellowship.
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