Zoë
My blogs
| Introduction | I became a biodiversity scientist after working with beetle communities in an oil-contaminated grassland in Saskatchewan as an undergrad.
Then I discovered oribatid mites...
Now I struggle with ideas surrounding how we explore the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem processes when we are restricted by our inability to identify species and our limited knowledge of the functional roles of the species present. As such, I spend most of my life flip-flopping between wanting to ask really cool questions about diversity and wanting to hide in the lab looking at mites. For my M.Sc. research I examined how forest harvesting affected forest floor properties, nutrient cycling processes, and microarthropods in the mixed-wood boreal forest of northern Alberta. During my Ph.D., I explored the canopy system of the ancient temperate rainforest on Vancouver Island, where oribatid mites are the dominant arthropod in suspended soil habitats. Here at McGill, the majority of my PDF research is investigating the interactive effects of habitat fragmentation and climate change on moss-microarthropod food webs in northern Quebec. |
|---|