Research Expertise and Interest
freshwater ecology, biodiversity conservation, global change biology, Drought
Research Description
Albert Ruhi is an Associate Professor of Freshwater Ecology and Conservation in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, where he co-leads Berkeley Freshwater. His group conducts large-scale data analysis and experiments to advance current understanding of the ecology and conservation of freshwater ecosystems, focusing on how river biodiversity is responding to increasingly‑severe droughts.
Prof. Ruhi received a B.S. in Biology and a Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of Girona (Catalonia, Spain), and has developed most of his research in water-scarce regions of the world, such as the Mediterranean basin and the American Southwest. Before joining UC Berkeley, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University, and a Fellow at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), where he studied dam impacts on river flows and biodiversity via time series analysis. His current research program at UC Berkeley focuses on understanding how hydrologic extremes disrupt key food-web interactions and ecosystem processes in rivers and wetlands globally. A frontier in this field is understanding fluxes of organisms and energy across ecosystem boundaries, e.g. between rivers and the adjacent terrestrial or coastal environment. Major research themes in the Ruhi Lab are:
- Climate change and river food webs
- Aquatic-terrestrial ecosystem linkages
- Time series analysis for the environment
- Wetland and estuarine ecosystem restoration
- Watershed-level conservation planning
The Lab is also involved in management and conservation efforts in California and beyond. Prof. Ruhi is an Associate Editor of Conservation Letters, and faculty co-director of the UC Berkeley Institute for Parks, People, and Biodiversity, which seeks to connect agency science needs to academic research capacity. His research has been recognized by an NSF CAREER award, a California Sea Grant New Faculty Award, a Hellman Fellow Award, and an Extraordinary Doctoral Degree Award in Environmental Sciences for his Ph.D. work on wetland ecosystem restoration. In Spring 2021 he also received a UC Berkeley teaching award (“Extraordinary Teaching in Extraordinary Times”) for an undergraduate course on time series analysis applied to ecological data (ESPM 174A).
Read more on the Ruhi Lab website.
