What it means to be a researcher: Water science and community connections in rural Brazil

Plenty of scientists leave their comfort zone for research, but few relocate to another continent— anthropology graduate student Cydney Seigerman has done it twice. In 2014, they worked as a Fulbright Teaching Assistant in Madrid, Spain. Today, they live in the small city of Quixeramobim in Ceará, Brazil, and have been working there since August […]
Burning questions: The mysteries of pyrogenic carbon and the effects of prescribed fire on soil

When you think of a forest on fire, you aren’t usually thinking about what’s happening in the soil- but graduate student Ali Moss is. The Spencer Research Grant winner and Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources student’s research investigates the relationship between prescribed fire and carbon cycling, specifically studying an organic material known as […]
Part 1: On the Road—and the River—with the Ecological Problem Solving Class

Odum’s Ecological Problem Solving course travelled through the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River Basin to receive a whirlwind introduction to problem solving at the intersection of science, society and policy.
A Day in the Life of a Pond: Measuring Small-Reservoir Emissions to Inform Infrastructure Decisions

By 7:45 a.m. on Tuesday, June 21, Laura Naslund had already spent over an hour in a canoe on a little pond on the east side of Athens, Georgia. Naslund, a graduate student in the Odum School of Ecology and a 2022 Spencer Grant recipient, was finishing up the first field sampling event of her […]
Precision Conservation of Imperiled Species
A tiny, rainbow-finned fish lives in the swiftly flowing waters of Georgia’s Etowah River. Known as the Etowah darter (Etheostoma etowahae), it exists only in the Etowah River Basin, mainly inhabiting the mountain streams of North Georgia. The Etowah darter is only one example of the diverse array of freshwater fish, amphibians, crawfish and mussels […]
Climate and Water Research Slam
Save the date: Climate and Water Research Slam – Thursday, May 12 1:00-5:00 The River Basin Center, the Georgia Initiative for Climate and Society, and the Office of Sustainability have joined forces for a climate and water “research slam” — a series of five-minute lightning talks by faculty and students on climate OR water (or both) […]
Third Wednesday Game Night with Dr. Karen Bareford
Last week Dr. Karen Bareford, the National Sea Grant and Water Resources Lead, delivered a Third Wednesday talk on the water resource efforts of the Sea Grant Network and its key partners, as well as the publicly available National Water Model. Afterwards, she presented the new Watershed Game: Coast Model, an engagement tool allowing players […]
Susan Wilde Receives Newcomb Cleveland Prize
RBC Affiliate Susan Wilde, associate professor of aquatic science at the UGA Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, and Timo Niedermeyer, professor of pharmacognosy at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in Germany have received the Newcomb Cleveland Prize for their research on the emerging problems posed by toxic cyanobacteria in aquatic habitats and effects on bald […]
Staff spotlight: Phillip Bumpers

From wading into streams to crunching numbers on datasets, Phillip Bumpers, the River Basin Center’s research coordinator, has dedicated his career to furthering human understanding of the complex freshwater ecosystems in Southeastern streams and rivers.
The Role of Freshwater Crabs in Neotropical Streams

Freshwater crabs play an important role in the breakdown of nutrients from natural materials that fall into streams, but few studies have looked into exactly how their relationships with other detritivores and the leaf litter itself impacts ecosystems. River Basin Center graduate student Carol Yang shed light on these relationships in neotropical streams in two […]