The American Society of Limnology and Oceanography has honored Prof. Michael Pace with the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Award

The G. Evelyn Hutchinson Award has been presented annually since 1982 to recognize excellence in any aspect of limnology or oceanography. The award is intended to symbolize the quality and innovations toward which the society strives and to remind its members of these goals. In lending his name to the award, Hutchinson asked that recipients be scientists who had made considerable contributions to knowledge, and whose future work promised a continuing legacy of scientific excellence.

From the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography:

This award is intended to symbolize the quality and innovations toward which the society strives and to remind its members of these goals. In lending his name to the award, Hutchinson asked that recipients be scientists who had made considerable contributions to knowledge, and whose future work promised a continuing legacy of scientific excellence. The G.E. Hutchinson Award is made each year to a scientist whose work has inspired us and promises future outstanding accomplishments. In view of his excellent contributions to scientific understanding of freshwaters and oceans, and the ongoing impact of his insights, Michael Pace is the premier choice for this award.

After undergraduate training in Biology and English at the University of Virginia, Mike obtained graduate degrees at the University of Georgia with Karen Porter, herself a student of G.E. Hutchinson. Pace’s early work compared the trophic ecology and feeding relationships of protozoa, rotifers and crustacean zooplankton. He also worked with Larry Pomeroy on a modeling analysis of coastal marine food webs. The papers from Georgia foreshadow Mike’s future work. He writes with clarity and precision (perhaps a legacy of his early training in English). He addresses the role of animal body size in ecosystem phenomena. The papers integrate field observations with complex concepts, and reveal interests that span freshwaters and oceans.

By the early 1980s, limnologists were comparing the roles of external drivers and internal processes in lake characteristics. Mike addressed this issue by analyzing a diverse set of lakes during a postdoc at McGill University with Jacob Kalff. In a prescient paper in CJFAS in 1984, Pace showed that zooplankton body size, but not biomass, could explain deviations of lakes from phosphorus-chlorophyll regressions. His findings helped explain how primary producers could be regulated jointly by nutrients and grazing.

At the University of Hawaii (1983-1985), Mike continued his pioneering work on the role of protozoa in aquatic food webs - a topic that became one of the key insights for understanding how the microbial loop influences biogeochemical cycles. Pace also developed an empirical model to describe one of the first relationships between primary production and particle export. This relationship, published in Nature (1987), is widely cited and still used today for lake and ocean models of vertical flux of particles.

In 1986, Mike moved to the Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. There he continued his work on biogeochemical consequences of microbial processes, and the effects of metazoan food webs on microbes. He collaborated on comparative studies of microbial production in freshwater and marine environments, relationships of primary producers and consumers in aquatic and terrestrial environments, and trophic cascades across a wide variety of ecosystems. Mike added more ecosystems to his life list, with projects on the Hudson River and experimental lakes near the Wisconsin-Michigan border. Whole-lake experiments became an important tool for his research on microbial dynamics and trophic cascades.

By the late 1990s Pace was looking well beyond the shoreline to understand ecosystem processes in lakes. He expanded the scope of his work to include terrestrial controls of organic carbon dynamics in Adirondack lakes. Mike was a leader of whole-lake stable-isotope enrichment experiments to evaluate the uses of terrestrial and lake-derived organic carbon by lake food webs. Pace circled back to the University of Virginia as a Professor in 2007. He continues to work on land-water interactions and the role of food webs in ecosystems, while expanding his horizons as an educator.

By all conventional measures of citation, publication and leadership, Mike Pace has made outstanding and sustained contributions to science. Yet his colleagues praise him most for attributes that are not measurable by statistics. In a field that is frequently contentious, Mike is open-minded and never dogmatic. Although he is a brilliant conceptual thinker, Mike grounds his papers carefully in observed patterns of nature. He is a generous collaborator. One correspondent noted that “Adding Mike to a team always makes it better”. And he is a fine teacher. Each spring as we prepare for another field season in northern Wisconsin, we look forward to the next big question that Mike will pose on the porch of the cabin as dusk falls over the lake. Whatever it is, it will evoke intriguing discussion and debate. Such conversations do more than just facilitate science; they are the heart of science itself. For his ability to raise the level of scientific conversation, and his many more tangible accomplishments, Mike Pace is an exemplary winner of the Hutchinson award.

Cited by Stephen Carpenter, Center for Limnology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706 USA; srcarpen@wisc.edu