Marie-Pier Hébert
The Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography presents the Raymond L. Lindeman Award annually to a young aquatic scientist for their notable work on an outstanding, peer-reviewed, English-language paper in the realm of aquatic sciences. This year, the Lindeman award will be given to Dr. Marie-Pier Hébert for her 2021 paper "Warming winters in lakes: Later ice onset promotes consumer overwintering and shapes springtime planktonic food webs". This paper highlights how warming winters that delay ice onset have important cross-season consequences by promoting both bottom-up and top-down forcing on lake plankton communities during winter that shape community structure and function at the start of the growing season. The Lindeman award will be presented to Dr. Hébert during the 2023 ASLO Aquatic Sciences Meeting in Palma, Spain in June 2023.
Dr. Marie-Pier Hébert is a currently a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Vermont and Université du Québec à Chicoutimi. Hébert et al. addresses the importance of studying biological interactions under the ice in winter seasons to better understand the following growing season’s community dynamics. This innovative mesocosm experiment, which Dr. Hébert led as part of her PhD work (at McGill University in collaboration with Université du Québec à Montréal), found that delayed ice cover onset extended the duration of photosynthesis, likely allowing primary consumers to gain high-quality fat reserves. Increased winter survival among these primary consumers was associated with increased predation the following spring, shaping planktonic food webs. This study broadened our understanding of how freshwater lakes may react to global climate warming and the cross seasonal trophic cascades that accompany it, and promises to impact the limnological field for decades to come.
ASLO President Dr. Patricia Glibert says, “Dr. Hébert’s study addressing how lake communities react to later ice-cover onset is crucial to expanding global change research. These findings suggest the disruption of trophic linkages and energy flow, highlighting the importance of further winter limnology studies and the attention to warming lakes and their altered community dynamics. We look forward to more of Dr. Hébert’s contributions to limnological research.”
Full Citation: Hébert, Marie-Pier, Beatrix E. Beisner, Milla Rautio, and Gregor F. Fussmann. "Warming winters in lakes: Later ice onset promotes consumer overwintering and shapes springtime planktonic food webs." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 48 (2021): e2114840118.