Making Waves: Catherine Leigh

Making Waves is the podcast of the Society for Freshwater Science

Episode 4: Assessing Australia's Intermittent Streams, Dr. Catherine Leigh

This month's podcast features Dr. Catherine Leigh focused on assessing intermittent streams in Australia.

Dr Catherine Leigh is a freshwater ecologist and post-doctoral researcher within the international IRBAS project (Intermittent River Biodiversity Analysis and Synthesis), based at Irstea, Lyon, France. She is passionate about riverine ecosystems and understanding the responses of biota, particularly aquatic macroinvertebrates, to natural or human-induced changes in river flow, land use and water quality.

She has worked on temporary, dryland, tropical and floodplain river systems throughout Australia, and on highly modified rivers in China, and has been studying the ecology of intermittent rivers for over 10 years. Her interest in these systems was sparked during her undergraduate degree at Griffith University, Australia on the benthic and hyporheic ecology of ephemeral rivers in South Australia, and throughout her post-graduate and post-doctoral research on the ecology of seasonally intermittent, wet-dry tropical rivers in northern Australia. She has also lead several projects within the broader Australian National Water Commission project, assessing ecological responses to flow intermittency and low-flow conditions across the Australian continent. Catherine will be based at Irstea for the next 2.5 years, and is also Honorary Research Fellow at Griffith University’s Australian Rivers Institute.

Papers covered in the podcast:
http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/11-0963.1
http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1899/12-002.1
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1470160X1300112X

Running time: 17 minutes
Host: Eric Moody
Published: 6/20/2013

Listen to the podcast

• Listen on the SFS YouTube Channel
• Low Quality MP3 (7.9 Mb)