Professor Jennifer Tank is the Director of the University of Notre Dame Environmental Change Initiative (ND-ECI). Tank has been actively involved at ND-ECI since it’s inception, previously serving as the principle investigator of the Land Use Program and the Director of the Notre Dame Linked Experimental Ecosystem Facility (ND-LEEF).
Tank is the Ludmilla F., Stephen J., and Robert T. Galla Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on nutrient and carbon cycling in streams and rivers and the influence of human activities on water quality and stream health.
Tank’s extensive research experience aims at better understanding the role that small streams play in removing nitrogen from the water and to prevent it from polluting downstream ecosystems. Her research was recently featured on the University of Notre Dame’s “What Would You Fight For?” series.
An international authority on the cycling of nutrients in freshwater ecosystems, Tank has published over 160 peer-reviewed journal articles on nitrogen and carbon cycling in streams and rivers. She received her doctoral degree from Virginia Tech and was a 2013 Leopold Leadership Fellow.
Tank was recently named a Hoosier Resilience Hero by the Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute. Tank, who also currently serves as the current president of the Society for Freshwater Science, is being recognized for her research that sits at the intersection of freshwater systems and agriculture in the Midwest.
At Notre Dame, Tank also leads the Indiana Watershed Initiative where her team is exploring how conservation practices like winter cover crops and restored floodplains can buffer the impacts of agricultural land use on adjacent streams and rivers. Their watershed-scale experiments, implemented on working lands, are quantifying the water quality benefits of conservation in a real-world setting, facilitated through engagement with key partners including local farmers and natural resource managers.