ABOUT ME...
I am originally from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, near the southern limit of the boreal forest. My research background has focused on geographic range limits of trees, as well as environmental change in continuous and discontinuous permafrost zones. I am broadly interested biotic and abiotic interactions in shaping species distributions. I use bioinformatics, citizen science, long term environmental monitoring, and field/lab experiments to evaluate controls on species' ranges limits along environmental gradients in natural and anthropogenically disturbed ecosystems.
I am originally from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, near the southern limit of the boreal forest. My research background has focused on geographic range limits of trees, as well as environmental change in continuous and discontinuous permafrost zones. I am broadly interested biotic and abiotic interactions in shaping species distributions. I use bioinformatics, citizen science, long term environmental monitoring, and field/lab experiments to evaluate controls on species' ranges limits along environmental gradients in natural and anthropogenically disturbed ecosystems.
A bright, winter day over the treeline ecotone near Churchill, Manitoba.
July 2018: Just out! One of the first papers to come out of our Global Treeline Range Expansion Experiment (GTREE; learn more at www.treelineresearch.com) led by Dr. Esther Frei at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research. Click the image below to learn more about seed provenance and disturbance effects on treeline in Davos, Switzerland!
July 2018: Check out this synthesis work led by Dr. Carissa Brown at Memorial University. Predispersal constraints introduce lags into tree range expansion in the North. Coniferous trees along the North Canol produce a lot of non-viable seed, meaning treeline there is stagnant. Click the pic below for a link to the article!
Jan 2018: Recently published work in ES&T on differentiating P and C fluxes in a benzene-degrading consortium using P18O4 stable isotope probing. Check out the link on the publication page for more info!
May 2016: Out and about in the Old Aspen stand in Prince Albert National Park. I was learning to deploy band dendrometers with Colin Laroque's MAD Lab. This June I'll be deploying dendrometers up in Churchill as part of a pilot study to evaluate climate response of treeline trees along a coastal gradient. There are some pure stands of larch near the Hudson Bay coast that don't appear anywhere else on the landscape. Why do these stands flourish there? I'll soon find out...
Some photos from the field...
The Canol Heritage Trail in the western Mackenzie Mountains, NWT, August 2015.
Wapusk National Park during June 2015
Field work along the Canol Heritage Trail in August 2014
