Karen Alofs

My research focuses on how environmental change, including climate, invasion and habitat destruction influences freshwater ecological communities across space and time. I am involved in a collaborative interdisciplinary project funded by a MIDAS Propelling Original Data Science (PODS) Grant: CHANGES: Collections, Heterogeneous data, And Next Generation Ecological Studies.We are developing protocols for integrating heterogeneous natural science datasets to investigate the impacts of environmental changes on species. Our project focuses on climate change impacts on inland lake fish communities across Michigan, drawing on more than a century’s worth of data and specimens archived at the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology (UMMZ) and the Institute for Fisheries Research (IFR), which is a cooperative unit of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Fisheries Division and the University of Michigan.