Oral presentations will be given during lab the weeks of Nov 19 and 26.  You will be responsible for all of the material in the presentations on the final exam, so pay attention to other people’s presentations and ask them questions when something isn't clear.  You will have access to a PowerPoint projector for your talk and should use it.  The slides from your presentations should guide the audience through your talk, should include the most important figures from the papers, and will also be posted on the course web site.  The format for the presentation is 30 minutes of presentation and 15 minutes for questions and discussion from the class. 

The goal is to present the state of knowledge on a broad topic in a way that reviews the relevant literature and findings and emphasizes the broad implications and outstanding issues.  I’ve listed two specific research papers from the primary literature under each topic to guide your presentations.  However, your presentation should be broader than just the papers listed.  You should begin with an introduction to the general topic, the questions posed and why they’re interesting.  A good way to do this is to present a history of ideas that led to the current way of thinking.  Your introduction should stress the main questions and observations.  Looking at the references cited in the papers listed is a good way to get a sense of earlier literature.  Use article databases like Web of Science to find out what’s known about a topic.  Review papers are good, you can also look for highly cited papers to find the most influential ones.  After your introduction, you should present the specific research questions, methods and findings of the two main papers.  Your conclusion should state how the papers are connected, and what future directions you see for this line of inquiry.  The objective is to give enough information about the methods and results of the studies that people can understand what was done, but not get bogged down in the details such that the main point is lost. 

You will be evaluated on how well you synthesize the topic, how thoroughly you research the background literature, and how clearly you present the specific information from the research papers.  You need to find the right balance of between giving the broad background and the specific detailed information from the studies.  You can ask your professor or TAs for help with this before your presentation if you’re not sure, but that means you need to prepare early enough to get help.

Here are the topics, you may choose a topic by emailing the instructor. Once a topic is taken, it will show up on the web site with the student's name in the table. You can research a different topic if it is approved by the instructor. 

Lakes and modern global climate change
Schindler D.W., Beaty K.G., Fee E.J., Cruikshank D.R., Debruyn E.R., Findlay D.L., Linsey G.A., Shearer J.A., Stainton M.P. & Turner M.A. (1990) Effects of Climatic Warming on Lakes of the Central Boreal Forest. Science, 250, 967-970
O'Reilly, C. M., Alin, S. R., Plisnier, P. D., Cohen, A. S., McKee, B. A. (2003) Climate change decreases aquatic ecosystem productivity of Lake Tanganyika, Africa.  Nature, 424, 766-768.

Causes of amphibian declines
Kiesecker J.M., Blaustein A.R. & Belden L.K. (2001) Complex causes of amphibian population declines. Nature, 410, 681-684
Johnson P.T.J., Lunde K.B., Ritchie E.G. & Launer A.E. (1999) The effect of trematode infection on amphibian limb development and survivorship. Science, 284, 802-804

Resistance and resilience of lakes to perturbations
Knapp, R. A., Matthews, K. R., Sarnelle, O. (2001) Resistance and resilience of alpine lake fauna to fish introductions. Ecological Monographs 71, 401-421.
Mittelbach, G. G, Turner, A. M., Hall, D. J., Rettig, J. E., Osenberg, C. W. (1995) Perturbation and Resilience - a Long-Term, Whole-Lake Study of Predator Extinction and Reintroduction 76, 2347-2360.

Lakes as records of past climates
Smol, J. P. et al.  (2005) Climate-driven regime shifts in the biological communities of arctic lakes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102, 4397-4402.
Patoine, A., Leavitt, P. R. (2006) Century-long synchrony of fossil algae in a chain of Canadian prairie lakes, Ecology, 87, 1710-1721.

Ecological speciation in lake organisms
McKinnon, J. S., Mori, S., Blackman, B. K.. David, L.. Kingsley, D. M., Jamieson, L., Chou, J.. Schluter, D.(2004) Evidence for ecology's role in speciation. Nature, 429, 294-298
Seehausen, O., van Alphen, J.J.M., Witte, F. (1997). Cichlid fish diversity threatened by eutrophication that curbs sexual selection. Nature 277:1808-1811

Effects of salmon-derived nutrients
Finney, B. P., Gregory-Eaves, I., Sweetman, J., Dougas, M. S. V., Smol, J. P. (2000). Impacts of climatic change and fishing on Pacific salmon abundance over the past 300 years. Science 290, 795-799
Helfield, J. M. and Naiman, R. J. (2001) Effects of salmon-derived nitrogen on riparian forest growth and implications for stream productivity. Ecology, 82, 2403-2409

Impact of lake organisms on terrestrial systems
Knight, T. M., McCoy, M. W., Chase, J. M., McCoy, K. A., Holt, R. D. (2005). Trophic cascades across ecosystems. Nature 473, 880-883.
Murakami, M., Nakano, S. (2002) Indirect effect of aquatic insect emergence on a terrestrial insect population through predation by birds. Ecology Letters 5, 333-337