On one of the first mild days in February, Duke’s Emily Bernhardt and her stream ecology team donned their hip waders and ventured out to the sycamore-lined banks of New Hope Creek.
On one of the first mild days in February, Duke’s Emily Bernhardt and her stream ecology team donned their hip waders and ventured out to the sycamore-lined banks of New Hope Creek.
The creek snakes its way through parts of Chapel Hill and Durham before emptying into Jordan lake, the main supply of drinking water for central North Carolina.
Bernhardt waded into the shallow stream and dipped a gas sensor into the water. She and colleagues have been monitoring fluctuations in oxygen and carbon dioxide that occur as these gases are taken up and released by algae, insects, fish and other stream organisms while they go about the business of life: photosynthesizing, growing, digesting, decomposing.
“This ‘breathing in and breathing out’ of all the organisms living in a river is sort of the pulse of a stream,” Bernhardt said. “It's a fundamental measure of the energy going in and out of the system.”
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Photo Credit: Larisa-K via Pixabay
