Each year the KBS LTER program awards two graduate students with summer research fellowships. Here Sydney Ruhala describes the research her 2016 summer fellowship supported. Sydney is an M.S. student in Jay Zarnetske’s lab at Michigan State University. She recently was awarded best poster presentation in basic research at the 2016 Society for Freshwater Science meeting in Sacramento, CA – congrats, Sydney! ~~~~~~ As a graduate student in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Michigan State University, I have spent my summers wading through the rivers of southwestern Michigan