Katlyn Gardner

Biography

Katy Gardner is a PhD candidate working with Dr. Chuck Hawkins. Broadly, her research addresses how stream salinity affects aquatic macroinvertebrate distributions. She is conducting long-term laboratory experiments to test for ion-specific and temperature effects on survival and growth of stream macroinvertebrates. She is also using models to infer salinity optima and upper limits of macroinvertebrate taxa from field data and assess whether individual size is associated with differences in stream salinity. Katy received her BS and MS in Biology from Missouri State University where she studied the aquatic larvae of ambystomatid salamanders.