Kathi Jo Jankowski
Biography
Kathi Jo Jankowski is the Principal Investigator for the Water Quality Component of the Upper Mississippi River Restoration Program's Long-term Resource Monitoring Element. She coordinates water quality monitoring and research on the Upper Mississippi in coordination with several federal and state agencies. Her research aims to understand how land use and climate change impact ecosystem processes in large rivers. She is specifically interested in nutrient and carbon cycling, ecosystem metabolism and food web ecology and has worked in freshwater systems from the boreal zone to the tropics.
Science and Products
Mapping the thermal landscape of the Upper Mississippi River
Temperature has a fundamental influence on physical, chemical and biological processing in aquatic ecosystems. River temperatures respond to a diverse array of drivers including air temperature, streamflow, and thermal inputs, but the physical template has been shown to play a significant role in structuring spatial and temporal variation in water...
Jankowski, Kathi Jo; Robinson, Larry R.; Kalas, John; Carhart, Alicia; Lubinski, Brian R.; Ruhser, Janis Watershed geomorphology modifies the sensitivity of aquatic ecosystem metabolism to temperature
How carbon cycles are regulated by environmental temperature remains a substantial uncertainty in our understanding of how watersheds will respond to ongoing climate change. Aquatic ecosystems are important components of carbon flux to the atmosphere and ocean, yet we have limited understanding of how temperature modifies ecosystem metabolic...
Jankowski, Kathi Jo; Schindler, Daniel E. Exploring silica stoichiometry on a large floodplain riverscape
Freshwater ecosystems are critical zones of nutrient and carbon (C) processing along the land-sea continuum. Relative to our understanding of C, nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P) cycling within the freshwater systems, the controls on silicon (Si) cycling and export are less understood. Understanding Si biogeochemistry and its coupled biogeochemical...
Carey, Joanna C.; Jankowski, Kathi Jo; Julian, Paul; Sethna, Lienne; Thomas, Patrick; Rohweder, Jason J. Identifying the molecular signatures of agricultural expansion in Amazonian headwater streams
Agricultural impacts on aquatic ecosystems are well-studied, however, most research has focused on temperate regions, whereas the forefront of agricultural expansion is currently in the tropics. At the vanguard of this growth is the boundary between the Amazon and Cerrado biomes in Brazil, driven primarily by expansion of soybean and corn...
Spencer, Robert G.M.; Kellerman, Anne M.; Podgorski, David C.; Macedo, Marcia N.; Jankowski, Kathi Jo; Nunes, Darlisson; Neill, Christopher
Indicators of ecosystem structure and function for the Upper Mississippi River System
This report documents the development of quantitative measures (indicators) of ecosystem structure and function for use in a Habitat Needs Assessment (HNA) for the Upper Mississippi River System (UMRS). HNAs are led periodically by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Upper Mississippi River Restoration (UMRR) Program, which is the primary habitat...
De Jager, Nathan R.; Rogala, James T.; Rohweder, Jason J.; Van Appledorn, Molly; Bouska, Kristen L.; Houser, Jeffrey N.; Jankowski, Kathi Jo