This award provides funds to the University of Wisconsin's Trout Lake Station to aid in the purchase of a boat and microscope for accurate measurements of fish and microbes in fresh water ecosystems. The station provides access to aquatic systems that range from temporary ponds to large lakes and that represent a broad diversity of hydrologic, edaphic, and trophic conditions. Most of these habitats lie within protected watersheds with low population densities. Current programs at Trout Lake include several multi-investigator, ecosystem-level investigations as well as numerous smaller-scale projects involving population and community ecology, hydrology, fisheries biology, and basic limnology. One major focus in these efforts has been to evaluate and quantify the organisms that occur in the ecosystems in our region. The new equipment will improve the ease and quality of these efforts.
