My Story
Ahoy! I’m Liz Renner, a fisheries ecologist and post-doctoral researcher in the School of Natural Resources. I grew up on a farm near Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and have lived most of my life on the tallgrass prairies and waters of the Northern Great Plains. I did my undergraduate studies in aquatic ecology and Spanish at Augustana University in Sioux Falls before pursuing my PhD in fish ecology with Keith Gido and Walter Dodds at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.
Before coming to UNL I worked for three years as a riverine fisheries biologist, first for the South Dakota Game Fish and Parks as a research and management biologist on the Upper Missouri River based in Fort Pierre, and then as a USFWS fish biologist working on the Pallid Sturgeon Recovery Program's river crew based out of Gavins Point National Fish Hatchery.
I'm a freshwater fisheries ecologist who studies the impact of habitat and climatic changes, fisheries and river management actions, and anthropogenic stressors on Great Plains fisheries, with a focus on food web shifts and trophic ecology in river-reservoir ecosystems. Specifically, my research centers on understanding how fish populations and freshwater community assemblages respond to changing environmental conditions such as water temperature, discharge, or nutrient availability. I'm currently a postdoc in Mark Pegg's Fish Ecology Lab, where I'm using spatial risk assessment modeling tools to predict potential pathways for spread of invasive Silver and Bighead Carp in Nebraska's Platte and Loup rivers. I'm also working with long-term acoustic telemetry datasets from transmittered fish in the Red River of the North to understand changes in native fish movement and life history strategies after the completion of a USACE fish passage mitigation project, as well as projects assessing long-term spawning phenology changes in Walleye and Pallid Sturgeon. I am co-teaching NREM 971 Quantitative Fisheries Assessment, a graduate course in applied fisheries statistics, alongside Mark over the Spring 2026 semester.
When I'm not working on or near the water, I enjoy spending time hiking, fishing, and hunting outdoors, which inspires my poetry and nature writing. I'm also an avid reader, motorcyclist, and quilter, so I write poems about fish and rivers and sew quilts inspired by the ichthyofauna of the Great Plains.