David Lodge, ecologist and Cornell Atkinson director, to retire

David Lodge, an ecologist whose storied career has included protecting the Great Lakes, pioneering eDNA use in aquatic environments, and leading the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, is retiring as director of Cornell Atkinson May 22. Lodge will retain his appointment as a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell for another year.

In an era of growing polarization, Lodge has prioritized building bridges across disciplines, organizations, and people, all guided by the values of improving public benefit and protecting the environment.

"This is a person who has deep, scientific knowledge, but is not satisfied to see it sit on a shelf. He very much wants to plug in where it can be useful, and that's exactly what he's done, working from the bench science all the way to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy," said Ryan Kelly, professor of marine science at the University of Washington. "At Cornell Atkinson, he has helped other people to do that, too, connecting their science to some use in the real world. In my experience with David, that's what has really stood out. He has this facility to work across different worlds and connect things in a way that engenders a lot of credibility and enables him to be successful."

Science for the public good

Lodge grew up in Alabama and Georgia, the son of an Episcopalian minister father and a stay-at-home mother who let him do taxidermy on the kitchen counter. He loved nature and living things, especially those that thrived in water. In his childhood bedroom, Lodge had ten aquariums.

He attended the University of the South (also known as Sewanee) and then won a Rhodes scholarship to the University of Oxford, where he earned a doctorate of philosophy in zoology. During college, Lodge spent a semester and two summers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as part of a National Science Foundation program. There, he connected with scientists who were just beginning to study the effects of acid rain. Ecologist Gene Likens, then a professor at Cornell, had discovered the phenomenon as part of his long-term studies of New Hampshire ecosystems.

"I didn't know anything about Cornell at the time, didn't know who Gene Likens was, but my mentor at Oak Ridge opened his file drawers of photocopied journal articles and said, 'read all these and figure out what you wanna do,'" Lodge said. "Among those papers were Gene Likens' discoveries on acid rain. That set me on the general path of pursuing research with public importance that I'm still on today."

Lodge was intrigued by the science, but also by the real world application. Likens identified that the sulfur dioxide produced by fossil fuel combustion at power plants in the Midwest was causing rain several states eastward to become so acidic that it was killing fish and disrupting ecosystems. Likens' research ultimately led to improvements in the Clean Air Act that reduced airborne pollutants, protecting human health and the environment.

"This policy of reducing sulfate emissions was incredibly successful and illustrates the power of research being put into practice in policy and driving dramatic improvements which are still bearing benefits today," Lodge said. "I knew this was the kind of work I wanted to do as a scientist."

Combating invasive species

Much of Lodge's research has centered on innovations to help prevent and manage invasive species, which are harmful species that humans introduce. In causing biodiversity loss, invasive species are "on par with climate change, land use, overharvesting, and pollution," Lodge said. Over the past 50 years, invasive species have caused an estimated $900 billion to $1.2 trillion in damages just in the U.S.

For example, consider the case of the invasive rusty crayfish in Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Rusty crayfish occur naturally in Indiana and Western Ohio, but were moved to more northern lakes by humans who used them as live fishing bait. Lodge has spent 42 years setting traps around lakes in northern Wisconsin to track the populations of rusty crayfish and understand how they are changing the ecosystem. The answer: a lot, and badly. Rusty crayfish are more aggressive than the other species of crayfish that exist in the lake, so can outcompete them for food and shelter.

"The changes to the lake are dramatic. The rusty crayfish clearcut the lake bottom; the underwater forests are gone. Snails and other invertebrate organisms that are food for rusty crayfish also disappear. And what you're left with, when rusty crayfish get abundant, is a barren lake bottom crawling with rusty crayfish," Lodge said. "The food web is shortened and less diverse, and there's less food left for fish. Then those changes produce economic impacts on the regional economy, because fish are what bring lots of people to the lakes."

Many scientists would document the changes in the lake's ecology and feel that their contribution to the effort had been completed, said Eric Larson, associate professor of natural resources and environmental sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. But Lodge, across his career, has taken the arduous next steps to build relationships with the regulators and organizations that can actually do something about the problems he's identified, Larson said. Lodge was a mentor to Larson during his postdoctoral program.

"David was so careful about looking at how regulations would actually be implemented. That was really influential work because David and his teams and collaborators truly listened to what federal agencies implementing policies needed and were responsive to that, instead of engaging in wishful thinking about how they wished federal regulations would work," Larson said. "David's ability to listen to other people, hear their feedback, and be truly participatory - I think those qualities are why his research footprint and its interfaces to both policy and practice are so big."

Protecting the Great Lakes

It was just those qualities that the Great Lakes Protection Fund was looking for when they connected with Lodge in the early 2000s. The Fund, an independent non-profit established by the seven state governments that surround the Great Lakes, was seeking to protect the lakes from a variety of threats, including invasive species like zebra and quagga mussels and Asian carp, said David Rankin, executive director of the Great Lakes Protection Fund. The ecological effects alone were profound, but the mussels also clog power plant water intakes and worsen water quality in a major source of drinking water, and Asian carp displace more economically important fish species.

Tasked with addressing the problem, Rankin began digging into scientific literature on invasive species and emerged with a question: "Why is there so much high-quality, academic work describing the problem, but no work of any quality solving it?"

Part of the issue was that identifying problematic species was difficult and expensive, and heavily monied shipping interests pushed back hard against regulations that might limit ships' movements, especially when it was not certain whether any one ship contained a new invader. Asian carp, for example, were ostensibly being held at bay by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers navigation locks and electrical fish barriers. Regulators and scientists tested the effectiveness of these measures by periodically catching fish and looking for Asian carp. But this process is expensive, labor-intensive, and can easily miss invaders when they are just starting to spread.

Then a professor at Notre Dame, Lodge had begun toying with an idea just beginning to be trialed in Europe: using the same kinds of DNA testing used by police at crime scenes to look for the presence of invasive species in lakes. In 2009, he and his lab took water samples upstream of the Army Corps' fish barriers and found that they tested positive for Asian carp DNA. Even though no actual fish had been caught, the presence of the DNA strongly suggested that carp were getting through. The discovery led to a public firestorm but ultimately Lodge was proven right: environmental DNA could detect the presence of aquatic species more accurately and at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods. Twenty years later, eDNA is a widely respected method used to track invasive species, assess endangered species, monitor fish populations and more.

"David's work has been foundational in moving eDNA technology forward in North America," Rankin said.

Many individuals and organizations worked collaboratively to address the invasive species challenges in the Great Lakes, which led to U.S. and Canadian regulators and the maritime industry updating rules and changing policies, he said.

"In 2006, we saw a new invader discovered every six weeks. By 2016, that discovery rate dropped to one every six years. That's a 98-plus percent reduction in invasive species pressure in this system, and David was part of that answer," Rankin said. "It's a success story that illustrates how much good we can do when people with different strengths and expertise work together to solve a problem."

Empowering others' impact at Cornell Atkinson

In 2016, Lodge came to Cornell as the second director of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. In that role, he has supported the same kinds of science-driven partnerships that have enabled him to be so successful in combating invasive species. Founded in 2010 with an $80 million gift from David '60 and Patricia Atkinson, Cornell Atkinson has expanded to support 700 Cornell faculty fellows working with dozens of external partners, including Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), The Nature Conservancy, Clear Air Task Force, Walmart, and Credit Suisse, among others. Some of the core initiatives that Lodge stewarded as director include the huge growth of programs and funding support for students and postdoctoral researchers, and the launch of the Innovation for Impact Fund, which offers funding to Cornell faculty and external partners to bridge the gap between science and action.

"David has provided extraordinary service to Cornell Atkinson, and the center is unquestionably stronger because of his leadership," said Gary Koretzky, Vice Provost for Research. "He's helped shape Cornell Atkinson into a central convening space for researchers across disciplines, while elevating Cornell's profile in sustainability research to the highest level."

Fred Krupp, President of EDF, said Lodge has been instrumental in building the long-standing, trusting relationship between EDF and Cornell.

"The institutions and all of the people involved know that the tone is one of mutual support for common good," Krupp said. "Perhaps David's greatest contribution is to be a great partner and nurture great partnerships because he has this skill of really understanding other people's perspectives. That has allowed him to creatively find the win-win answers that work for Cornell and work for a partner like EDF and allow us to generate some extraordinarily high-impact solutions for the world."

Some of those solutions, with EDF and other partners, have included supporting farmers with cutting-edge technology and financing, and conducting research with non-academic partners on reducing climate risk, accelerating energy transitions, increasing food security, and advancing One Health.

All of that work has been possible because people across disciplines, institutions, and worldviews have worked collaboratively and in good faith to make progress that protects people and the planet, Lodge said.

"The contributions I have made have been primarily in recognizing the connections that need to be made in order for us to have a better understanding of how the world works, both the natural world and the way that we humans interact with it," Lodge said. "I hope that I've contributed in that way, fostered research that has had a positive impact on society. But there is so much more that can be done, and I think the need is greater than ever."

Krisy Gashler is a writer for Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.