Dr. Frank deNoyelles

Most recently I have been studying particular Kansas reservoirs in an attempt to better understand water quality issues related to land use in watersheds and the aging process where reservoirs fill with sediments at varying rates. With several students and faculty from my department, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Chemistry, I am also studying the degradation of organic pollutants such as pesticides and pharmaceutical products under different experimentally manipulated environmental conditions. I also continue to conduct research on subepilimnetic phytoplankton in lakes begun more than 20 years ago at the Experimental Lakes Area in Ontario, Canada and more recently also pursued in lakes elsewhere in Canada and in the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming.

Often my research includes using experimental manipulation to simulate certain types of aquatic disturbances that produce phytoplankton changes, such as those resulting from eutrophication, acidification, climate change, and toxicant stress. For such experimentation, at the University of Kansas I have designed and constructed nearly 200 experimental ponds (0.045 ha), outdoor fiberglass tanks (10 m3), and different types of in situ enclosures for smaller scale experiments within these systems. Research over the 20-year history of our aquatic field station reported in nearly 100 publications has also continually refined the use of experimentally manipulated surrogate ecosystems for aquatic research. In 1991 a 4.5-ha 13-m deep reservoir was constructed at this field station (5 km from campus) in a protected 50-ha watershed to add further variety to this compliment of experimental ecosystems. As one of our projects with this reservoir my students, other faculty and I have been closely monitoring and experimentally manipulating the vertical migration of subepilimnetic phytoplankton populations like those in natural lakes that we also continue to study. The publications listed below represent the variety of the types of research that I have pursued through the years and continue to pursue.