Eric Dexter, a recent PhD graduate from Washington State University’s School of the Environment with Dr.s Stephen Bollens and Gretchen Rollwagen-Bollens, has published a new paper on invasive plankton in the Columbia River in the journal PLoS ONE.  These authors collaborated with Dr.s Stephen Katz and Stephanie Hampton, and the study includes an evaluation of the population-level effects of introduction of invasive species into the Columbia River zooplankton community using Multivariate Auto-Regressive (MAR) time series modelling techniques.  Among the findings were that local plankton communities can indeed be negatively impacted by the introduction of invasives such as the copepod, Pseudodiaptomus forbesi. The analysis leveraged a 12-year monthly time series curated by researchers at Washington State University’s Vancouver campus in the laboratories of Dr.s Bollens and Rollwagen-Bollens.  This study once again reinforces the values of long term monitoring programs.