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Karen Alofs
Associate Professor
Ecosystem Science and Management
Water
Conservation + Restoration
Office
G128A
About
Karen Alofs studies how ecological concepts can be used to address conservation concerns in freshwater environments. Research in the Alofs Lab examines the effects of environmental change, and usually focuses on three types of questions:
- How are ecological communities changing across spatial scales and over time?
- What are the impacts of species interactions versus environmental filtering on community structure, population persistence and invasion?
- Can species traits be used to predict species responses to environmental change? And what mechanisms control the vulnerability of species to environmental change?
We use a variety of approaches to answer these questions including standardized sampling across regional scales and along disturbance gradients, collecting trait data from natural history collections, and testing mechanisms in experiments.
Publications
Dick GJ, Shriberg M, Ogdahl M, Alofs KM, Biddanda BA, Carrick H, Doran PJ, Fisk AT, Jones SE, Klaper R, McCauley D, Moerke A, Meuninck R, O’Reilly CM, Overpeck JT, Phanikumar MS, and Rudstam LG. 2025. Investing in Great Lakes science is critical for society’s safety and prosperity. Journal of Great Lakes Research. DOI: 10.1016/j.jglr.2025.102614
King KBS, Schell J, Wehrly K, Lenard M, Singer R, López-Fernández H, Thomer A, and KM Alofs. 2025. Community science helps digitize 77 years of fish and habitat data for thousands of lakes in Michigan, USA. Scientific Data. 12:1038 DOI: s41597-025-05241-z
Williams O, Petrella S, Eaton L, Muller R, Kukulski P, Seelbach P, Riseng C, and KM Alofs. 2025. A comparison of participatory science seining and electrofishing for sampling fish assemblages in an urban river. Ecological Solutions and Evidence. 6: e70051. DOI: 10.1002/2688-8319.70051
Grabda EMS, Flood P, King K, Breck J, Wehrly K, and KM Alofs. 2025. Mismatch between climate-based bioenergetics model of fish growth and long-term and regional-scale empirical data. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. 82: 1–15. DOI: 10.1139/cjfas-2024-0266
Alofs KM and KE Wehrly. 2025. Fish mass mortality events in northern temperate lakes happen later in the year than in the past. Ecosphere. 16: e70182. DOI: 10.1002/ecs2.70182
Alofs KM, King KBS, Lenard M, Schell J, Singer R, Wehrly K, López-Fernández H, and A Thomer. 2025. Community science brings together natural history collections and historical survey data to understand changing ecological patterns. BioScience. DOI: 10.1093/biosci/biae131
Jackson SA, Lucas K, Wehrly K and KM Alofs. 2024. Intraspecific variation in metabolic responses of a cool water fish to increasing temperatures. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Science. DOI: 10.1139/cjfas-2023-0377
Education
- PhD, The University of Texas at Austin (ecology, evolution, and behavior)
- BA, University of Chicago (biology, ecology and evolution)
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