Annual River Retreat

River Retreat:

Each year UNC’s River Systems Science group goes away over MLK weekend to think. The retreat has evolved through time, and it is now at some type of equilibrium form. The low point was 2006; I don’t think we’ve reached a high point yet. The retreat started in 2004 to help Scott Ensign finish his masters data collection, and there were only 6 of us crammed into Scott’s living room floor. But at night after a brutally cold day of field work, the group of students got into vigorous discussion about rivers, food webs, ecosystems, hydrology, and science in general. I realized that the setting was ideal for stimulating genuine exchange and debate of ideas, paradigms, and how science is done.

Since then, my group of UNC students, and any alum who are still interested and/or sane, meet for the weekend and read papers focused on a broad topic. We invite professors and students from other schools to diversify the ideas, and also to ensure the accuracy of ecological ideas and statements (with which I tend to get quite liberal otherwise).

2009

2009 RIVER RETREAT READINGS AND AGENDA

2008

2008 RIVER RETREAT READING LIST AND AGENDA

RIVER RETREAT THROUGH TIME

		2009 In 2009 joined forces with Johns Hopkins geomorphologists, Duke ecologists, and a token cheese-head from Univ of Wisconsin, plus a couple stragglers from Virginia Tech. We talked about prediction.
		2008 In 2008 we joined forces with Virginia Tech, Virginia, and Duke to think and talk about the big ideas/topics at the interface of Ecology and Geomorphology, and what is at the forefront of research in this vein. The highlight was Scott Ensign’s dramatic reading of his poem…
		2007 In 2007 just the UNC group went to Coweeta Hydrologic Lab and spent the weekend hiking in the mountains, looking at headwater streams. The focus of the readings and discussion was on Howard T Odum’s concept of ecosystem energy, and the recent work in the area of Metabolic Theory of Ecology. Who was there (in photo from left to right): Scott Ensign, Lauren Patterson, Jason Julian, Erich Hester, Chris Jochem, John, Matt Smith, Martin Doyle, Daisy Small
	No pictures because the group of students were so hacked off at me that they refuse to acknowledge that this event ever happened…	2006 In 2006 we again joined forces with Duke, and with Bud Needham, and worked at the Timberlake Restoration site for a weekend. It is probably the closest that my students have ever come to mutiny. We were supposed to be thinking about what the definition of a stream is with regard to headwater streams, but we mainly tried to stay warm and get Bud’s truck out of the mud.
		2005 In 2005 we joined forces with Emily Bernhardt’s group from Duke and did some work on a tidal freshwater stream in coastal North Carolina. We were, in theory, thinking about surface-subsurface interactions and tributary junctions, but never really got there… (from left to right: Arjun Dongre; Daisy Small, Jason Julian; Elizabeth Sudduth, Jen Morse; Emily Bernhardt; Martin Doyle; Rebecca Manners; Monica Lipscomb; Erich Hester)
		2004 The first year (left to right: Scott Ensign, Matt Smith, Elizabeth Caron, Adam Riggsbee, Sarah Carter, and Martin Doyle) River retreat was at Beafort North Carolina to work on the topic of transient storage and nutrient retention. The retreat resulted in the paper Ensign and Doyle, 2005, in Limnology and Oceanography.