Sarah Laske, Ph.D.

My research focuses primarily on three areas of fisheries research: aquatic food webs, community ecology, and effects of landscape processes and scale in Arctic and subarctic species and ecosystems. The rapidly changing climate in northern ecosystems is shifting the thermal landscape where species live, eliciting a biological response to that change. I am interested in how those changes will influence aquatic systems, including their species composition or diversity, trophic structure, or function. Often, however, there is little to no baseline information available, and study must begin with questions regarding species presence or assemblage composition. By using a suite of modeling tools, I can integrate data from individual fish, communities, and the environment in order to answer questions that are relevant to fishery managers, the public, and other stakeholder groups, while also adding to ecological understanding of high latitude ecosystems and communities.