A new collaboration between scientists in the U.S. and Brazil hopes to increase our ability to predict how biological communities may change in a warming world. The researchers will investigate differences in biodiversity in tropical and temperate streams to better understand the differences between organisms in these ecosystems. The National Science Foundation has supported the project with a three-year, $500,000 seed award.

Biodiversity is under threat from shifts in temperature, weather patterns, and habitat availability worldwide, says Chris Swan, co-lead on the project and professor of geography and environmental systems at UMBC. “Scientists like myself study what regulates the number of species that you see and the combination of species that you see, and why they occur the way that they do,” Swan says. “Those patterns are changing due to global change.”

The new study will focus on functional diversity, a concept that looks at species’ traits and the roles they fill in the ecosystem, rather than just the number of different species present. For example, in a forest, there might be a large number of bird species, but if they all eat seeds, there’s low functional diversity. Functional diversity would be higher if, among the same number of species, some ate seeds, others ate insects, and others ate small rodents.

“What is the functional response in terms of biodiversity to this global change? That’s what we’re studying,” Swan says. The results could help scientists make predictions about how species in temperate climates might adapt to rising temperatures.

Big questions, small organisms

The study will include researchers from UMBC, Virginia Tech, and University of California-Riverside in the U.S., and São Paulo State University and São Carlos State in Brazil. Streams near São Paulo, Brazil, and Blacksburg, Virginia, will represent tropical and temperate climates, respectively. The team will collect data from each stream monthly for a year.

They’ll manually measure the number of invertebrate species and how many of each species are present. Invertebrates they are likely to find include a wide variety of insects, worms, and crustaceans (such as crayfish). The team will also record traits of each individual, like its size and whether it was collected from the streambed, swimming in the water channel, or flying in the air above the stream.

On top of data on all the organisms, the researchers will also record information about the stream environment, like acidity, temperature, and the presence of nutrients like nitrogen, plus the streambed material (rock or sand, for example), the stream’s sun exposure, and more.

They will intentionally include large and small streams, too. The size of the stream “has practical implications,” Swan says, because in addition to small streams making up 60 percent of all river miles, “if you change a landscape, say by development, you are more likely to flatten a small stream than a large stream. So they are disproportionately under threat.”

Tropical trend

Some differences between species in tropical versus temperate streams are known. For example, tropical organisms tend to be smaller and have shorter life cycles. Their populations also tend to be smaller. This means local populations disappear through random effects more often in tropical ecosystems, creating space for other species to fill their functional roles.

The new study will produce a much larger data set than previously existed, to further clarify some of these differences between temperate and tropical stream ecosystems and possibly discover new ones. 

One of the collaborators, Kurt Anderson at UC-Riverside, focuses on modeling ecological data. The team will “use the parameters that we estimate from the field data to tune his models,” Swan says, “so we can make predictions and test our hypotheses about what could happen in the future.” One hypothesis might be that as the world warms, organisms in temperate streams could start to take on traits more common in the tropics.

Biodiversity is the key to success

Beyond the research, the collaboration also presents unique opportunities for international education. The U.S. and Brazilian faculty leads will offer a joint online course for graduate and advanced undergraduate students, where they will read and analyze academic papers related to the study. “We realized that learning, teaching, and discussion styles are not the same in the two countries,” Swan says, so this class will give students and faculty alike the chance to navigate new ways of interacting along with discovering new science.

One core point Swan will emphasize with his students is the importance of biodiversity on a global scale. In ecology, the presence of a wide variety of organism types and the functions that they perform is called the “portfolio effect.” Just like a diverse financial portfolio, a diverse biological “portfolio” of species is less likely to suffer heavy losses across the board as conditions change—something is bound to adapt and survive. Also, “if you have more species, then you have more niches filled,” Swan says, “so resources are being used more efficiently.”

“Variety in life is the whole kit and caboodle,” Swan says. “If you didn’t have variety, nothing would be able to adapt. There would be no adaptation to change.” 

With ample biodiversity, though, adaptation to change is much more likely. But what that looks like—which species will adapt successfully or will be most at risk—is still unknown. Starting with tiny organisms in streams, Swan and colleagues are working to help figure that out.

In the professional world, you’ll find yourself giving feedback on a near daily basis. Here are four tips to help you provide productive, positive, and meaningful insights.

Dear Faculty and Staff,

UMBC has decided to participate in The Baltimore Sun Top Workplaces program, which identifies and compares top places to work in the Baltimore metropolitan area, based solely on the opinions of employees.

Thanks to everyone who has completed the survey. If you have yet done so, this is a reminder to keep an eye out for an email with a link to the online survey. The survey, conducted by Energage, an independent research company, should take about five minutes to complete. Energage will keep your responses confidential; however, certain members of the UMBC community will have access to the optional written comments on the survey. If you wish to remain completely anonymous, please do not submit any optional written comments that could identify you individually.

Additionally, please note:

• If you have not received a survey link, please check your spam or junk email for a message from "Energage Survey." To open the survey invitation, you may have to confirm the email is not spam.
• If you accidentally delete the survey email, you will receive a reminder email with another access link.
• Do not forward the survey email to a colleague. Each email has a unique code to prevent multiple responses.

If you have questions or concerns, please contact Energage directly at 1-800-749-0187 or by replying to your survey email.

We encourage everyone's participation and hope you will take this opportunity to share your honest feedback.

UMBC students are known for the strength of their diversity: not just in their personal backgrounds, but in the breadth of their academic interests and professional goals. 

Accordingly, Retrievers’ summer 2022 internships spanned a vast array of subjects and disciplines, from history to mechanical engineering, and working in fields ranging from groundwater all the way up to outer space.

The four UMBC students profiled below vividly embody this wide spectrum, but they all have two things in common. Each completed their internship before starting their junior year, and each has the same advice to new students: Visit the Career Center sooner rather than later.

“It is never too early to start,” agreed Christine Routzahn, the Career Center’s director. “Internships offer students an opportunity to gain experience, build their career readiness skills, and develop professional connections that can help them succeed in competitive career paths and graduate programs.”

Up and Away

“I found the Career Center’s resources really helpful in crafting and perfecting my resume,” said Madelyn Pollack ’24, a history major with public history and Judaic studies minors in the Honors College and Humanities Scholars programs whose internship was at—of all places—NASA. 

“I had an interest in space,” Pollack explained, “But when I applied, I wasn’t expecting a call back—I wasn’t expecting to get to do this.”

It turned out that her internship’s responsibilities included a rich variety of opportunities to apply her passion for history: Pollack had a seat at the table in publishing meetings, she got to research and publish key moments of aerospace-related history on the space agency’s official social media outlets, and she was even able to create a research-based presentation on orbital debris and public opinion.

Pollack said that taking an internship early in her college career helped her further focus her academic interests and refine her idea of what kind of historian she wants to be. 

“As a history major, I didn’t have an idea of a specific focus I wanted to take” within the field, she said. But, “if you ask me now what my dream job is, I would say if a job opens up [at NASA] in the next three years or so, it would be really nice to be a historian over there.”

Pollack already has a start on that goal: Based on her success as a summer intern, NASA recently hired her as a continuing intern part-time starting this fall.

First Things First

Ian Nana ’24, mechanical engineering, said one of the biggest misconceptions his fellow students seem to have is that there’s no point in doing an internship until you know exactly what your academic and professional goals are.

“I definitely recommend to any new student: Even if you’re not sure exactly what you want to do, go to the Career Center your freshman year,” said Nana. “You might try one internship and be like, ‘Okay, I like this—I might do this.’ Or, ‘I don’t like this.’”

Even if it’s the latter, Nana said, just having that first experience on your resume makes you a much better candidate for the next internship or job opportunity.

“When I came [to UMBC] for my first semester, I went to the Career Center,” Nana said. And although he didn’t immediately see exactly what he was looking for, he reminded himself that an internship that strengthens general work skills can be just as valuable as field-specific experience, so he applied for a broad spectrum of internships.

“When I applied to other ones, even though they weren’t related to engineering, they showed teamwork. They showed collaboration—how I deal with people,” Nana said. “College is great, but what [employers also] want is experience, because that’s really what is going to make you valuable.”

Nana also encourages students to start looking for opportunities where he did: at UMBC’s Fall Career and Internship Fair. This year, the fair—held on Sept. 21—will host 140 organizations, many of whom are seeking a wide spectrum of summer 2023 interns, from first-year undergraduates to advanced graduate students.

Routzahn highly recommends that all students participate in upcoming Career Center events and activate and upload their resumes to Handshake,UMBC’s new job and internship platform. Top employers are posting incredible internships, part-time, and full-time jobs daily. 

Nana, who worked this summer as an engineering intern at Intralox—a global firm that specializes in designing and creating computer-controlled conveyor-belt systems—should know: Though he had to overcome steep technical challenges, including learning a whole new programming language, his success speaks for itself.

“My manager told me to definitely come back,” he said. “When you see your skills actually being applied and you do something and it works, that’s the best feeling.”

All in the Details

Alexander Bauserman ’24, history, echoed his fellow 2022 interns’ recommendation to visit the Career Center early, often, and with an open mind.

“I would say go as soon as you have the opportunity,” Bauserman said. Even if there’s not an obviously perfect alignment between a given internship opening and your major, he added, “The value of these internships is that sometimes they offer unexpected skills.”

Bauserman spoke from recent experience: He was able to tap into a longstanding personal interest, strengthen his core skills, and develop new ones in his virtual internship at the Maryland Pesticide Education Network, which gathers and disseminates information on the harmful effects of various pesticides and advocates for organic and other alternative agricultural land uses.

“I’m actually a history major, and even though this [internship was] environmental, I actually had an interest in environmental science in my high school years,” he said.

That passion served him well as he dove into the highly detail-intensive work of reformatting environmental science abstracts, checking links on the organization’s website, and learning how to leverage search engine optimization.

“They’ve all been new skills that I’ve gained, because I didn’t really work in any of these areas directly before, but they’re very useful, and I’ve been able to add them to my resume, so I’m very pleased with that,” Bauserman said.

Learning While Doing

Terra Miley ’25, chemical engineering, definitely didn’t waste any time looking for internships: She started as a first-year student. “I’d definitely heard from upperclassmen about how helpful the Career Center is,” she said. “Once you make your first appointment, you realize how helpful it is.”

Miley interned at Potomac Photonics, Inc., a digital and micro-manufacturing firm based at the UMBC Technology Center, “basically learning how to do everything.”

“I was doing a digital workspace for the company, so I was able to get exposed to a lot of different projects and machines and pretty much all of the work they do,” she said.

Miley added that the internship also boosted her confidence that her academic journey—she’s on a bio-technology/bio-engineering track—is the right one for her.

“A lot of the parts that [Potomac Photonics] made were for medical companies, which is kind of what I want to get into. And it made me realize: I am definitely interested in that.”

So interested, in fact, that she’s already made an appointment with the Career Center to get set up with an internship for next summer. “I wanted to try to get an actual research opportunity for next summer and they gave me a giant list of opportunities … that I can look at,” Miley said.

Such resources, Miley said, make the Career Center ”super helpful.”

Routzahn said student success stories such as Miley’s, Bauserman’s, Nana’s, and Pollack’s are happily the norm at UMBC. 

“Most employers use internships as a recruiting tool to find their future full-time employees,” she noted, adding that “55 percent of our recent graduates who were employed at graduation indicated that they accepted full-time offers with an organization that they interned or worked for while at UMBC.”