This year’s speaker is Dr. Christine Hatch from the University of Massachusetts who will present a program titled Embracing Changein Lake Ecosystems. Here is a brief summary of her talk: “The natural world is full of change, whether we are aware of it or not. It’s comforting to think of thousand-year-old trees as having populated our forests long before we did, and counting on their presence long after we’re gone, but even trees are temporary travelers across the landscape, though at a slower pace. To understand an ecosystem is to understand it at a point in time, evolving as it must from one state to another driven by myriad factors, many natural, some human.
Through my work I have observed how much change human ingenuity can produce on a landscape in a relatively short time, and miraculously, how quickly a buried wetland can recover given the right conditions and a nudge in the right direction. In this talk I will explore a brief history of Fitzgerald Lake (it wasn’t always a lake, after all) as well as some of the current drivers of change in the ecosystem (temperature, beavers, water chemistry, geomorphology).”

Dr. Hatch is Extension Professor of Water Resources and Climate Change in the Earth, Geographic, and Climate Sciences Department, Research-Extension Liaison for the Center for Agriculture, Food, and the Environment at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a public member of the Massachusetts Water Resources Commission and the Massachusetts liaison to the Northeast USDA Climate Hub. In her research, she uses temperature to track the movement of water in hydrogeologic systems with diverse tools including piezometers, loggers, thermal imagery, distributed temperature sensing, and drones (UAV’s).