Audrey Thellman

Biography

Audrey Thellman received a B.S. in Environmental Sciences with a concentration in Earth Sciences from the University of Notre Dame in 2018. Under the mentorship of Dr. Emily Bernhardt, Dr. Thellman went on to study how freshwater primary producers respond to warming winters and other climatic drivers in the Northeastern United States and beyond, receiving her PhD in Ecology from Duke University in 2023. Before joining the faculty in the Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology Department at UCSB, Dr. Thellman spent two years working with Dr. Tamlin Pavelsky as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There, she worked on creating an ice cover dataset for 100,000s of lakes globally using optical remote sensing. Her current research focus is on how freshwater ecosystems are responding to climate change, especially responses to changing ice and snow conditions.

Research

Climate change is fundamentally altering the quantity and quality of freshwaters on the planet. Understanding how freshwater ecosystems are responding to this change, especially at the base of the food web, is not only fundamental to ecology but also to humans that rely heavily on freshwater for consumption, agriculture, and recreation. The advent of new technology in freshwater ecology makes it possible to evaluate how the complex interactions of climate and human-induced changes are shifting the ecology of rivers and lakes. In our lab group, we evaluate the energetic and biogeochemical consequences of a changing climate in inland waters. We use a suite of tools and emerging resources, from sensors to satellites, to evaluate two broad research questions: 1. What controls the timing and magnitude of inland water ecosystem energetics? 2. How is climate change altering ecosystem energetics in inland waters?