How Many Limnologists Does It Take to Fix the Plumbing? The Arising Researcher

In my junior year at Saint Olaf College, I joined a literature group called Discussions in Ecology (DIE; an unfortunate acronym). Led by two devoted ecology professors, the members of DIE gathered weekly over dinner to discuss a foundational or new paper in ecology. As we were at an undergraduate-only institution, this was our substitute for a weekly lab meeting and a way to foster community. I had only recently switched the focus of my biology major from biochemistry, in which I was a decidedly mediocre student, to ecology. The change in academic focus was precipitated by my first field experience, assisting with a beaver population survey in northern Minnesota as a part of a January interim course. I reasoned that if I could still love a subject after 20 days of pursuing it in below-freezing temperatures, it was worth pursuing as a career. (However, the following January I decided I had experienced enough frozen field work and took a tropical biology course instead.) At one DIE meeting in the spring of 2009, we read Jon Cole and colleagues' “Plumbing the global carbon cycle: Integrating inland waters into the terrestrial carbon budget” (2007, Ecosystems 10:172–185). We had been discussing mass balance approaches and biogeochemical cycles, so the article had been selected to fit both topics. We spent the time over dinner explaining the passive and active pipe metaphor to each other and discussing the assumptions and unknowns in each part of the budget presented in the paper. This was truly the first time that a scientific paper had captured my fascination and discussing it that evening with my make-shift lab group was the beginning of a line of “carbocentric” limnological research (see Prairie (2008) Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 65:543–548) that I pursued throughout my dissertation and continue to pursue today. The concept that the active pipe diagram illustrates is that inland waters are not simply conduits for terrestrial carbon to the ocean, but instead they actively cycle terrestrial carbon influencing downstream flows. The concept and synthesis of the budget was transformational. For a few years, it seemed as though you couldn't attend a presentation on aquatic carbon cycling at a meeting and not see the active pipe diagram in the introductory slides. My own dissertation defense began with a cartoonish rendering of the diagram which I used to explain the importance of lakes in regional carbon budgets. In addition to providing context and estimates of the magnitude of the role of inland waters in the terrestrial carbon cycle, Jon and his colleagues' work also revealed, through a well-laid budgeting framework, the gaps in our knowledge on the subject. In my opinion, this aspect of the paper helped to foster a vast and productive line of research that continues in limnology today.

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