Sarah A. Spaulding

Bio: Sarah A. Spaulding is an academic researcher from University of Colorado Boulder. The author has contributed to research in topics: Diatom & Genus. The author has an hindex of 26, co-authored 72 publications receiving 2266 citations. Previous affiliations of Sarah A. Spaulding include United States Geological Survey & Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.

Aquatic fulvic acids in algal-rich antarctic ponds

Abstract: We isolated fulvic acids from two antarctic coastal ponds by means of preparative scale column chromatography with XAD-8 resin. Both ponds are on Ross Island. Pony Lake at Cape Royds has abundant phytoplankton populations, and Feather Pond at Cape Bird has a luxuriant benthic algal mat. Neither site has higher plants in the watershed. The dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentration in Pony Lake was very high, but the percentage of DOC accounted for by fulvic acid was low, as has been observed for other lakes with algal-derived DOC sources. Fulvic acid from Pony Lake was more enriched in nitrogen than fulvic acid from Feather Pond, with a C: N atomic ratio of 13 in Pony Lake and a C: N ratio of 24 in Feather Pond. The [ 13 C] NMR spectra for the coastal pond samples showed that the content of sp 2 -hybridized carbon atoms (aromatic or olefinic) was only 16.5% of the total spectral area for Pony Lake and only 20.1% for Feather Pond

Potential habitat distribution for the freshwater diatom Didymosphenia geminata in the continental US

Abstract: The diatom Didymosphenia geminata is a single-celled alga found in lakes, streams, and rivers. Nuisance blooms of D geminata affect the diversity, abundance, and productivity of other aquatic organisms. Because D geminata can be transported by humans on waders and other gear, accurate spatial prediction of habitat suitability is urgently needed for early detection and rapid response, as well as for evaluation of monitoring and control programs. We compared four modeling methods to predict D geminata's habitat distribution; two methods use presence–absence data (logistic regression and classification and regression tree [CART]), and two involve presence data (maximum entropy model [Maxent] and genetic algorithm for rule-set production [GARP]). Using these methods, we evaluated spatially explicit, bioclimatic and environmental variables as predictors of diatom distribution. The Maxent model provided the most accurate predictions, followed by logistic regression, CART, and GARP. The most suitable habitats we...

Mountain lakes: Eyes on global environmental change

Abstract: Mountain lakes are often situated in protected natural areas, a feature that leads to their role as sentinels of global environmental change. Despite variations in latitude, mountain lakes share many features, including their location in catchments with steep topographic gradients, cold temperatures, high incident solar and ultraviolet radiation (UVR), and prolonged ice and snow cover. These characteristics, in turn, affect mountain lake ecosystem structure, diversity, and productivity. The lakes themselves are mostly small, and up until recently, have been characterized as oligotrophic. This paper provides a review and update of the growing body of research that shows that sediments in remote mountain lakes archive regional and global environmental changes, including those linked to climate change, altered biogeochemical cycles, and changes in dust composition and deposition, atmospheric fertilization, and biological manipulations. These archives provide an important record of global environmental change that pre-dates typical monitoring windows. Paleolimnological research at strategically selected lakes has increased our knowledge of interactions among multiple stressors and their synergistic effects on lake systems. Lakes from transects across steep climate (i.e., temperature and effective moisture) gradients in mountain regions show how environmental change alters lakes in close proximity, but at differing climate starting points. Such research in particular highlights the impacts of melting glaciers on mountain lakes. The addition of new proxies, including DNA-based techniques and advanced stable isotopic analyses, provides a gateway to addressing novel research questions about global environmental change. Recent advances in remote sensing and continuous, high-frequency, limnological measurements will improve spatial and temporal resolution and help to add records to spatial gaps including tropical and southern latitudes. Mountain lake records provide a unique opportunity for global scale assessments that provide knowledge necessary to protect the Earth system.

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Loss on ignition as a method for estimating organic and carbonate content in sediments: reproducibility and comparability of results.

Abstract: Five test runs were performed to assess possible bias when performing the loss on ignition (LOI) method to estimate organic matter and carbonate content of lake sediments. An accurate and stable weight loss was achieved after 2 h of burning pure CaCO3 at 950 °C, whereas LOI of pure graphite at 530 °C showed a direct relation to sample size and exposure time, with only 40-70% of the possible weight loss reached after 2 h of exposure and smaller samples losing weight faster than larger ones. Experiments with a standardised lake sediment revealed a strong initial weight loss at 550 °C, but samples continued to lose weight at a slow rate at exposure of up to 64 h, which was likely the effect of loss of volatile salts, structural water of clay minerals or metal oxides, or of inorganic carbon after the initial burning of organic matter. A further test-run revealed that at 550 °C samples in the centre of the furnace lost more weight than marginal samples. At 950 °C this pattern was still apparent but the differences became negligible. Again, LOI was dependent on sample size. An analytical LOI quality control experiment including ten different laboratories was carried out using each laboratory's own LOI procedure as well as a standardised LOI procedure to analyse three different sediments. The range of LOI values between laboratories measured at 550 °C was generally larger when each laboratory used its own method than when using the standard method. This was similar for 950 °C, although the range of values tended to be smaller. The within-laboratory range of LOI measurements for a given sediment was generally small. Comparisons of the results of the individual and the standardised method suggest that there is a laboratory-specific pattern in the results, probably due to differences in laboratory equipment and/or handling that could not be eliminated by standardising the LOI procedure. Factors such as sample size, exposure time, position of samples in the furnace and the laboratory measuring affected LOI results, with LOI at 550 °C being more susceptible to these factors than LOI at 950 °C. We, therefore, recommend analysts to be consistent in the LOI method used in relation to the ignition temperatures, exposure times, and the sample size and to include information on these three parameters when referring to the method.

Evaluation of specific ultraviolet absorbance as an indicator of the chemical composition and reactivity of dissolved organic carbon.

Abstract: Specific UV absorbance (SUVA) is defined as the UV absorbance of a water sample at a given wavelength normalized for dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentration. Our data indicate that SUVA, determined at 254 nm, is strongly correlated with percent aromaticity as determined by 13C NMR for 13 organic matter isolates obtained from a variety of aquatic environments. SUVA, therefore, is shown to be a useful parameter for estimating the dissolved aromatic carbon content in aquatic systems. Experiments involving the reactivity of DOC with chlorine and tetra- methylammonium hydroxide (TMAH), however, show a wide range of reactivity for samples with similar SUVA values. These results indicate that, while SUVA measurements are good predictors of general chemical characteristics of DOC, they do not provide information about reactivity of DOC derived from different types of source materials. Sample pH, nitrate, and iron were found to influence SUVA measurements.

Fast Tree: Computing Large Minimum-Evolution Trees with Profiles instead of a Distance Matrix

Abstract: Gene families are growing rapidly, but standard methods for inferring phylogenies do not scale to alignments with over 10,000 sequences. We present FastTree, a method for constructing large phylogenies and for estimating their reliability. Instead of storing a distance matrix, FastTree stores sequence profiles of internal nodes in the tree. FastTree uses these profiles to implement neighbor-joining and uses heuristics to quickly identify candidate joins. FastTree then uses nearest-neighbor interchanges to reduce the length of the tree. For an alignment with N sequences, L sites, and a different characters, a distance matrix requires O(N^2) space and O(N^2 L) time, but FastTree requires just O( NLa + N sqrt(N) ) memory and O( N sqrt(N) log(N) L a ) time. To estimate the tree's reliability, FastTree uses local bootstrapping, which gives another 100-fold speedup over a distance matrix. For example, FastTree computed a tree and support values for 158,022 distinct 16S ribosomal RNAs in 17 hours and 2.4 gigabytes of memory. Just computing pairwise Jukes-Cantor distances and storing them, without inferring a tree or bootstrapping, would require 17 hours and 50 gigabytes of memory. In simulations, FastTree was slightly more accurate than neighbor joining, BIONJ, or FastME; on genuine alignments, FastTree's topologies had higher likelihoods. FastTree is available at http://microbesonline.org/fasttree.

Spectrofluorometric characterization of dissolved organic matter for indication of precursor organic material and aromaticity

Abstract: We studied the fluorescence properties of fulvic acids isolated from streams and rivers receiving predominantly terrestrial sources of organic material and from lakes with microbial sources of organic material. Microbially derived fulvic acids have fluorophores with a more sharply defined emission peak occurring at lower wavelengths than fluorophores in terrestrially derived fulvic acids. We show that the ratio of the emission intensity at a wavelength of 450 nm to that at 500 nm, obtained with an excitation of 370 nm, can serve as a simple index to distinguish sources of isolated aquatic fulvic acids. In our study, this index has a value of ;1.9 for microbially derived fulvic acids and a value of ;1.4 for terrestrially derived fulvic acids. Fulvic acids isolated from four large rivers in the United States have fluorescence index values of 1.4‐1.5, consistent with predominantly terrestrial sources. For fulvic acid samples isolated from a river, lakes, and groundwaters in a forested watershed, the fluorescence index varied in a manner suggesting different sources for the seepage and streamfed lakes. Furthermore, we identified these distinctive fluorophores in filtered whole water samples from lakes in a desert oasis in Antarctica and in filtered whole water samples collected during snowmelt from a Rocky Mountain stream. The fluorescence index measurement in filtered whole water samples in field studies may augment the interpretation of dissolved organic carbon sources for understanding carbon cycling in aquatic ecosystems.