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I am an Associate Professor of Biology at Ashland University in Ashland, OH. I am also an active member of AU's Environmental Science Program. I specialize in aquatic ecology. I have worked in small lakes, warm coastal estuaries, and a large ocean region in the Arctic called the North Water.	Patty Saunders at Cape Herschel, Ellesmere Island, Canada
An image of Sites Lake, OH, with the GPS location of some depth soundings marked.	My research students and I spend time at Sites Lake in Richland Co., OH. We spend even more time in the lab using a variety of analytical tools. We are interested in food webs and how they are affected by habitat differences. One recent project has looked at how small crustaceans respond to the "smells" of other species in the water. We have been testing methods that allow us to observe their behavior when exposed to species like bluegill fish (a predator) or Ceratophyllum (an aquatic plant).
In Spring 2009, our Limnology class took a week-end field trip to Lake Erie. We focused on coastal wetlands and estuaries. We studied the dynamics and variety of habitats found in these ecosystems. Biological diversity was represented by massive numbers of plankton species and 25 species of birds, including sandhill cranes and bald eagles! Limnology is next offered in Spring 2011.	Jessica Parant (AU'09), Sherry Chronister (AU'09), and Valerie Peck (AU'08) sample the lower estuary at Old Woman Creek National Estuarine Research Reserve, Huron, OH.