THE JONES LAB
Annis Water Resource Institute - Grand Valley State University
Aquatic Ecology Across Scales
In our lab, we develop knowledge and tools for the prediction of lake ecosystem services under future climate and land use scenarios and identify strategies for mitigation of undesirable aquatic environmental change. These goals are accomplished using a combination of theoretical and empirical research that integrates approaches from ecology, molecular biology, and mathematics.
PRIMARY RESEARCH FOCUSES
Recreational Fisheries Dynamics
Regulation of Primary Productivity and Water Quality
Carbon Cycling and Lake-mediated Climate Feedbacks
RECREATIONAL FISHERIES DYNAMICS
The Jones Lab’s research on recreational fisheries focuses on understanding and sustaining fisheries as coupled social-ecological systems, especially in lake landscapes where fishing is both an ecological process and an important human activity. We pursue interdisciplinary research that examines how ecological factors (like fish population dynamics and habitat conditions) interact with human dimensions (including angler behavior, governance, and community values) to shape the health and sustainability of freshwater recreational fisheries in regions such as northern Wisconsin, western Michigan, and Lake Michigan. This work integrates ecological data, stakeholder engagement, and systems-level analysis to inform management strategies that balance ecological integrity with the cultural and economic importance of recreational fishing.
Key Project: Fishscapes
Recreational fishery landscapes across the United States and other parts of the world have tremendous cultural and economic value, but they are vulnerable to degradation, and in many regions, they are suffering collapses similar to the collapses that have plagued many marine fisheries. Previous research suggests that the involvement of local organizations in governance may improve outcomes in common-pool resource systems, but it is not clear whether this arrangement can be effective. This project sought to improve the sustainability of recreational fisheries by improving understanding of the natural, human, and coupled natural-human processes that make these systems work.
Ongoing Projects
Bluegill Life History Strategies, Structure, and Hybridization
Bluegill (Lepomis macrochirus) are a species of freshwater fish that are abundant across North America and are commonly fished recreationally. Their variable life history strategies and frequent hybridization with Pumpkinseed (Lepomis gibbosus) make them an ideal study system. Our research has attempted to fill in gaps in knowledge about these strategies and hybridization which have important implications ecologically and in terms of conservation and management. MAIN QUESTIONS • What are the mechanisms by which resource availability constrains life history strategies and subsequent fish productivity? • How do environmental gradients impact life history and energy allocation? • What environmental features influence hybridization frequency and how are hybrids morphometrically different from purebreds?
Relevant Studies
Max Larson Master's Thesis (ongoing)
Catch-and-Release, Stocking, and Trophy Fisheries
Across the world, recreational fishing is culturally and socioeconomically important, and well over 100 million people are estimated to engage in that practice across North America, Europe, and Oceania. However, many recreational fisheries are open-access, making them easily susceptible to overfishing. In an effort to combat that, fisheries often utilize management techniques such as catch-and-release regulations and stocking waterbodies with fish. Understanding how these practices affect fish populations, how anglers interact with them, and how anglers utilize recreational fisheries is crucial to the continued accessibility of the sport as well as the continued vitality of fish populations. MAIN QUESTIONS • How can we use modeling to predict effects of environmental changes and management decisions in recreational fisheries? • Does catch-and-release fishing cause behavioral changes in fish and how does that impact catch rates? • What are the key socioecological drivers of catch hyperstability?
Relevant Studies
REGULATION OF PRIMARY PRODUCTIVITY AND WATER QUALITY
The Jones Lab investigates how physical, chemical, and biological processes regulate primary production and overall water quality in lakes. Our research combines field observations, controlled experiments, high-frequency sensor networks, and ecosystem modeling to untangle how nutrient inputs, light availability, hydrodynamics, and food-web interactions drive algal growth, oxygen dynamics, and nutrient cycling across space and time. By linking mechanistic studies with landscape-scale drivers, our work aims to advance our theoretical understanding of lake primary production while also improving predictions of bloom risk, informing nutrient-management strategies, and guiding restoration actions that protect freshwater resources and the communities that depend on them.
Key Project: Regulation of lake productivity by terrestrial dissolved organic matter
Lakes are economically and culturally important components of the landscape. Microscopic algae and aquatic plants strongly influence the benefits that humans derive from lakes, because they influence water quality and are the foundation of the food web supporting species important to commercial, recreational, and subsistence fisheries. The abundance and growth rate of algae contribute to lake productivity, and lake productivity is affected by inputs of natural and human-derived nutrients, primarily phosphorus and nitrogen. Lakes receive from their watersheds substantial inputs of terrestrial organic matter, which control light availability, water temperature, and other aspects of lake ecosystem structure and function. The goal of this project was to test newly developed theories about how these inputs of terrestrial organic matter influence the productivity of lake food webs.
Ongoing Projects
GLAMR: the Global Lake Metabolism Repository
"Ecosystem metabolism” includes the processes of gross primary production and respiration, by which organisms capture, use, and release energy from the sun. These processes support food webs, determine carbon balances, and power biogeochemical cycles. GLAMR is a centralized, public repository of ecosystem metabolism estimates and related data for lakes, ponds, reservoirs, and other lentic water bodies around the world. Data to estimate ecosystem metabolism are now available for hundreds of lakes and thousands of lake-years. These data are scattered among many published and unpublished datasets. With GLAMR, our goal is to bring these data together in one place to facilitate synthetic analyses.
Relevant Resources
Drowned River Mouth Lakes
Drowned river mouth lakes (DRMLs) are unique ecotones that link rivers and upstream watersheds to the Great Lakes. Because DRMLs are located at the interface of multiple ecosystems and integrate nutrient inputs from diverse landscapes, they play important roles in regulating water quality and nutrient export to coastal regions. Although DRMLs occupy strong gradients in land use and hydrology in western Michigan, the effects of those gradients have been underexplored. To address these questions, we intend to sample over 20 DRMLs three times per year to characterize seasonal and inter-lake variability in water quality. MAIN QUESTION • What are the the consequences of changing land use, hydrology and seasonality on DRML water quality and ecosystem health?
Relevant Studies
Research is currently being conducted.
CARBON CYCLING AND LAKE-MEDIATED CLIMATE FEEDBACKS
Our research on lake carbon cycling and greenhouse gas emissions explores how inland waters process and release carbon and the mechanisms that govern whether lakes act as sources or sinks of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane (CH₄). Our work examines carbon fate and transport dynamics, including how primary productivity and terrestrial organic matter inputs influence the generation, transformation, and eventual emission of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. This includes quantifying internal CO₂ production from biological respiration versus external CO₂ inputs and assessing how these processes vary among lakes with different nutrient and hydrological conditions, helping predict how climate change and land-use shifts might alter lake carbon dynamics and their contributions to atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.
EAGER: The implications of interacting land use legacies and drought cycles for lake district carbon cycling
Lakes are globally important ecosystems. Lakes provide diverse services, including elemental cycling, food provisioning, recreation, and climate regulation. Unfortunately, scientists remain very uncertain about the extent of lakes’ role in regulating climate across the globe and the approaches currently used to estimate the role of lakes are crude. The major goal of our work was to improve scientists’ ability to quantify lakes’ role in regulating climate and predict how climate regulation by lakes will change in the future. To do so, we built and used mathematical models that explicitly consider ecological processes occurring in each lake in a region. Across our project we used both data collection and analysis and mathematical modeling to improve our understanding of how lakes regulate climate by storing carbon in their sediments and releasing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
Ongoing Project
Carbon Cycling in Lake Catchments of Arctic Sweden
Variability, magnitude, and environmental drivers of methane production in the Arctic are understudied. This project is an effort to fill some of those gaps in collaboration with Cristian Gudasz at Umea University in Sweden.
Relevant Studies
Past Project
Lake Productivity and Microbial Communities Mediate Methane Emissions
Previous research has shown that many lakes produce the greenhouse gas methane. As greenhouse gas emissions are one of the primary causes of climate change, our understanding of lake methane emissions is very important. Studies have shown factors such as algal biomass, microbial activity, and hydrology can play a large role in the amount of methane emitted. MAIN QUESTIONS • How do algal biomass and subsequent methane dynamics change seasonally? • How does variation in microbial community composition influence sediment methane production? • How do hydrological factors such as depth and catchment affect methane production in lakes?