Research in our lab is dedicated to understanding how anthropogenic activities alter community structure and ecosystem processes (e.g., productivity, decomposition, and biogeochemical cycling) in freshwater ecosystems. We embrace our lab members’ differences in gender, color, disability, ethnicity, age, family or marital status, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, ability, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, veteran status, and other characteristics.
Undergraduate researchers are an important part of our team and we are always interested in undergradaute students contacting us about potential volunteer or paid positions, or about opportunities to conduct research for credit. If you are an undergradute interested in research, plese visit the contact page for information.
Principle Investigator
kcapps@uga.edu
Office Phone: 01.706.542.9673
Fax (Odum): 01.706.542.4819
Curriculum Vitae
Google Scholar
Krista is an aquatic community and ecosystem ecologist. She works in both temperate and tropical freshwater systems and she is obsessed with wastewater. She earned a BS in biology and political science from Hope College, a MS in environmental science from the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, and a PhD from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University. Krista conducted her dissertation research on the community and ecosystem-level effects of armored catfish invasion in the Usumacinta River in southern Mexico. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship through the Sustainability Solutions Initiative at the University of Maine. Krista also served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Honduras and a Fulbright-Hays Scholar in Mexico. In a previous life, she thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail.
Krista holds a joint position through the Odum School of Ecology and the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory at the University of Georgia (UGA). At UGA, she is an affiliated faculty member with the Center for Integrative Conservation Research, the Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems, and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Institute. She is an associate director of the River Basin Center and she is the director of the Future Faculty for Inclusive Research Excellence (FFIRE) Postdoctoral Scholars program at the university.
Krista lives in Athens with her partner and their seven-year old son. Her family shares a home with myriad fishes, a snake, a spotted salamander, and two guinea pigs.
Postdoctoral Researchers
Google scholar:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=6kNXXJQAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
Email: isanchezgonzalez@crimson.ua.edu
Irene is a postdoctoral fellow in the UGA Future Faculty for Inclusive Research Excellence (FFIRE) program. Irene is an aquatic ecologist with broad interests in community ecology, conservation biology, organismal functional traits, and biotic and abiotic interactions. Irene’s research focuses on 1) understanding spatial and temporal patterns in taxonomic and functional diversity across ecological scales and 2) assessing the relationships between organisms and the structure and function of the ecosystems they inhabit. Throughout her career Irene has used empirical data on freshwater mussel communities and their functional traits to answer fundamental ecological questions. Irene earned her Bachelor of Science in Biology from Missouri Valley College and her Master of Science in Biology from Arkansas State University. Irene graduated from The University of Alabama, where she completed her Ph.D. in Biological Sciences in the lab of Dr. Carla Atkison studying morphological trait variation and niche partitioning of freshwater mussels along ecological gradients. See her personal website for more information.
PhD Students
andrew.blinn@uga.edu
Andrew is a PhD student working on a research project studying carbon dynamics and ecosystem function in urban streams as part of the CURB project. His research interests include stream metabolism in urban river networks and how city landscape characteristics may influence carbon dynamics in streams. He earned his MS from Kent State in 2022 studying stream ecosystem response to storm events in the Costello Biogeochemistry lab, and completed a BS at Penn State. Stream ecology played a large role in developing his passion for ecological sciences and he hopes to foster the passion of future scientists through education. Andrew’s interest in education and streams was reinforced during his time as an interpretive park ranger and naturalist for Maryland and Delaware State Parks.
anujamital@uga.edu
Research Gate
Anuja Mital is a Ph.D. student through the Integrated Conservation (ICON) program, and is co-supervised by Krista Capps and John Maerz. She completed a BS double majoring in Botany and Zoology in 2014, and a Masters in Wildlife Biology in 2016 from India, studying the community ecology and resource partitioning of freshwater turtles in the Ganges river basin. She has also documented freshwater turtle populations across the Brahmaputra river in NE India and her interests include population ecology of aquatic reptiles, the hydrology and flooding of large rivers, and freshwater habitat management alongside conservation education and outreach. Anuja is also the co-founder of ‘Freshwater Turtles and Tortoises of India‘, a citizen-science initiative to increase awareness and research on these taxa in India. At UGA, she plans to continue to explore freshwater food webs in the Brahmaputra with an emphasis on turtle ecology and use a systems approach to explore socio-ecological systems dynamics in the Brahmaputra to support turtle conservation in the region.
css36162@uga.edu
Christian graduated with a BA in Animal Behavior from Bucknell University in 2018. As an undergraduate, he worked under Dr. Elizabeth Capaldi and Sean Reese studying interspecies interactions and life history of freshwater mussels in the Susquehanna River. After graduating, he spent a year studying at the University of Heidelberg in Germany on a fellowship. Upon returning to the United States, he worked as a Naturalist at the Coastal Institute in Cambria, California teaching students about terrestrial and marine coastal ecology and at The Institute in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania teaching about wetland and forest ecology. Christian is currently pursuing his PhD in Ecology at the Odum School of Ecology and Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, co-advised by Dr. Krista Capps and Dr. Stacey Lance. His research will focus, in part, on the effects of legacy contaminants on fish communities at SREL.
MS Students
nvargas@uga.edu
Natalia Vargas López is currently a master’s student at the Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia. She completed her undergraduate degree in Biology at the University of San Carlos in Guatemala, investigating the impacts of oil palm plantations on periphyton communities in Ecoregion Lachuá. She worked as a lab technician at the Atitlán Study Center, contributing to limnological monitoring efforts focused on Lake Atitlán, one of the most beautiful lakes in the world. In her master’s studies, Natalia is concentrating on analyzing the long-term dynamics of water quality in rivers that flow into Lake Atitlán, exploring its relationships with changes in land cover in Lake Atitlan basin.
