Professor begins work with lake institute

Shawn Devlin, an Assistant Research Professor for Aquatic Ecology at the University of Montana Flathead Lake Biological Station, has joined the staff of the Whitefish Lake Institute to conduct research on ongoing projects.

“This is an excellent opportunity for WLI to expand its scientific research capacity and for our two organizations to increase our collaborative partnership to further watershed science,” said Mike Koopal, WLI’s founder and executive director. “I expect Shawn to expand our integrated knowledge of Whitefish Lake and answer some lingering questions about lake dynamics so that our community can better manage our headwaters lake.”

Devlin and Koopal are also partnering on a research paper to describe the unique and complex dynamics of Tally Lake. Devlin’s efforts at the biological station encompass work with a sophisticated computer model and the extensive dataset collected on Flathead Lake by biological station researchers over the past 35 years.

“The model helps frame the questions of how climate change or introduced species like zebra mussels may affect the lake’s biogeochemistry and thermal dynamics, and how increased nutrient loading and changes in land use may affect primary production and water clarity,” according to Devlin.

Devlin earned his doctorate from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and a bachelor’s in environmental biology from Unity College in Unity Maine. He conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, prior to coming to work at the biological station.

Devlin recently returned from Antarctica, where he and fellow scientists studied the unique lake ecology of a permanently ice covered lake in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, one of only two places on the continent not covered by an ice sheet.