Maria Sakowski

Masters Student

2026 Recipient of the Biodiversity Institute Graduate Student Excellence Grant

Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit

Graduate Advisor: Anna Chalfoun

Background:

The environmental conditions that structure aquatic organism distributions are rapidly changing due to both local and global stressors. Fish species vary in their responses to these novel conditions with the possibility for non-linear responses associated with threshold limits, where small changes in environmental conditions result in rapid changes in biodiversity. Threshold responses are of concern due to the difficulty or potential inability to reverse them once they are exceeded. While threshold responses have been evaluated in other aquatic ecosystems, prairie stream ecosystems remain understudied despite holding extensive biodiversity and facing intense anthropogenic pressures.  

My research aims to quantify threshold responses in Great Plains fish assemblages focusing on key human driven stressors like urbanization, agriculture, and stream fragmentation. Threshold values can act as benchmarks to create effective management plans and can reveal where vulnerabilities lie across the landscape. In addition to identifying thresholds, I will also investigate how climate and land use interact to influence those thresholds.  Evaluating stressors individually can oversimplify the complex change that ecosystems face. Interactions between multiple stressors acting on an ecosystem simultaneously can amplify the effects of individual stressors, increasing the likelihood of crossing ecological thresholds sooner than expected. Despite growing concern about these complexities, a gap in understanding remains in the how interactions can accelerate thresholds. My project addresses this gap and will provide insight to how aquatic biodiversity will respond to ongoing local and global change.