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Joel Reynolds

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Hydrologic processes greatly influence Alaska’s physical and biological resources and the human communities that depend upon them. These processes will also be greatly impacted by expected changes in climate, including warming temperatures and changing seasonal precipitation patterns and amounts. However, current understanding of those impacts is limited. Improving that understanding is a first step toward assessing how the likely changes in hydrology will impact other physical and biological processes. The Western Alaska LCC and the Alaska Climate Science Center, with support from other LCCs, hosted a workshop of 28 hydrologists, researchers, fisheries biologists, local experts and managers for a workshop structured...
The role of sea ice berm formation to alter environmental marine forcing in West Alaska coastal communities
Bering Sea storms introduce various environmental conditions that adversely affect human activity and infrastructure in the coastal zone and the ecosystems they depend upon. Storm impacts include interactions with sea ice in all potential states: large floes, shore-fast ice, and incipient sea-ice in frazil or slush state. In particular, sea ice can act to enhance or mitigate the impacts of adverse marine state, even as the event is occurring. Such occurrences should be part of a forecasting regimen, however scientific work has not been conducted on this phenomena, with the result that a physical model describing the formation of slush ice berms does not exist. To arrive at such a model requires visits to and input...
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Floods, spatially complex water flows, and organism movements all generate important fluxes of aquatic-derived materials into terrestrial habitats, counteracting the gravity-driven downhill transport of matter from terrestrial-to-aquatic ecosystems. The magnitude of these aquatic subsidies isoften smaller than terrestrial subsidies to aquatic ecosystems but higher in nutritional quality, energy density, and nutrient concentration. The lateral extent of biological aquatic subsidies is typically small, extending only a few meters into riparian habitat; however, terrestrial consumers often aggregate on shorelines to capitalize on these high-quality resources. Although the ecological effects of aquatic subsidies remain...
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Alaska’s freshwater resources, vitally important for salmon and other species, are vulnerable to changes resulting from climate change. Though temperature is a critical element in the suitability of aquatic habitats, Alaska’s stream and lake temperature monitoring is occurring through independent agencies/partners without a means to link and share data. Because a coordinated network of monitoring data can help scientists and managers understand how aquatic systems are responding to climate change, conducting an inventory of past and present stream and lake temperature monitoring efforts has been identified as a priority science need for Alaska. This project consolidated existing monitoring site locations and attributes...
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How local geomorphic and hydrologic features mediate the sensitivity of stream thermal regimes to variation in climatic conditions remains a critical uncertainty in understanding aquatic ecosystem responses to climate change. We used stable isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen to estimate contributions of snow and rainfall to 80 boreal streams and show that differences in snow contribution are controlled by watershed topography. Time series analysis of stream thermal regimes revealed that streams in rain-dominated, low-elevation watersheds were 5–8 times more sensitive to variation in summer air temperature compared to streams draining steeper topography whose flows were dominated by snowmelt. This effect was more pronounced...
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