MS Student graduated Spring 2015. My thesis research primarily focused on the impact of low head dams on stream ecosystem processes. During the first year of my graduate career I developed a project to see whether or not dam status played a role in leaf breakdown rates. Leaf decomposition is a vital ecosystem service that when quantified can tell researches a lot about the condition of that stream. What we found to be most interesting in this first project was that just below an intact dam where most would speculate to have a decline in leaf breakdown we actually saw a significant increase. After adding in the results from all of my aquatic insect data I found that the greatest increase in leaf decomposition did not coincide with the greatest number of invertebrate shredders. I then decided in my second year to pursue a follow up project, which I am currently working on, to determine whether microbial communities or aquatic insects play the largest role in leaf decomposition in the presence of an intact low head dam.