This award will initiate a collaborative research effort by ecologists, biogeochemists, and ecohyrdologists at the University of California at Berkeley and Princeton University to study how the common hippopotamus affects ecosystems - and how change to these ecosystems in turn affects the hippopotamus. Remarkably little is known about the importance of the common hippopotamus to the ecosystems that they inhabit, despite the fact that they are recognized to be a vulnerable and declining species. Hippopotamus rest in rivers and shallow lakes during the day and then emerge at night to feed on land. By virtue of these movements these large herbivores transfer vast quantities of nutrients and energy across the boundary between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. These connections are likely to have a major influence on ecological properties and processes in each type of ecosystem. To identify these effects, the movement ecology of hippopotamus, the rates at which they vector nutrients across ecosystems, the impacts that these transfers have upon the ecology of recipient ecosystems, and how environmental physics (i.e. river flow, rainfall) influence all of the above factors will be studied.
Results from this work will help us to understand how hippopotamus shape the ecology of adjacent ecosystems and how climate change and alterations in water use may disrupt these interactions. More broadly and importantly, this work will extend our general understanding of how transfers of material and energy influence the ecology of entire landscapes, how closely neighboring ecosystems are linked to one another, and how physical forcing determines the nature and importance of these connections. In addition to these important scientific contributions this project will provide training for national and international postdoctoral researchers, involve undergraduates in research, generate creative science media for the general public, and support science outreach programs in educationally underserved rural settings.
