Freshwater Biodiversity in Urban Stormwater Ponds: Community Assembly, Dispersal, and Environmental Filtering of Aquatic Insects in These Novel Ecosystems: Ilia Ferzoco (Exit Seminar)
Event Details
- Event Category
- Exit Seminar
- Date
- August 14, 2026
- Time
- 10:00 am
- Location
- UTM, IB 280
About
Urbanization imposes local and regional ecological filters on freshwater communities by reducing lentic habitat availability, limiting dispersal, and altering environmental conditions. Urbanization also leads to new pond creation, which can impact aquatic insect biodiversity. In many cities, constructed stormwater
ponds are more numerous than natural ponds and wetlands, yet their ecologies and role in biodiversity maintenance remain poorly resolved.
Ferzoco’s thesis asks how these constructed ponds shape aquatic insect community assembly, biodiversity, functional trait distributions, and dispersal dynamics under anthropogenic change. The author combined meta-analytic methods, multivariate analyses of survey data, and mechanistic lab and field experiments.
Overall, this thesis advances our understanding of freshwater community assembly in novel urban ecosystems, and identifies
stormwater ponds as valuable systems for understanding freshwater biodiversity under environmental change and as urban blue spaces with conservation potential.
Supervisor: Shannon McCauley
Committee Chair: Keisuke Fukuda