Research Interests
Albert Ruhí is an Associate Professor of Freshwater Ecology in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley. His group combines field experiments, chemical tracers, and time-series analysis to study how river ecosystems respond to climatic extremes. A frontier in this field is understanding how drought is altering the movement of organisms and nutrients between groundwater, rivers, and adjacent forests. During the Miller Professorship, he will examine the extent to which drought can disrupt the production and transfer of critical omega-3 fatty acids along freshwater food webs, from algae to aquatic insects and the terrestrial vertebrates that feed on them. This research should help us better understand the significance of cross-ecosystem linkages driven by critical dietary components like omega-3 fatty acids.
