Naturalist, ecologist, biodiversity data scientist

I am a PhD student in the Spribille Lab at the University of Alberta, with a life and research based in the southern Gulf Islands of the Salish Sea, within the shared, unceded, and asserted territories of the pune’luxutth’, quw’utsun’, snuneymuhw, leey’qsun, shts’um’inus, tla’amin, tsawwassen, lekwungen, lhaq’temish, and W̱SÁNEĆ nations, as well as the Indigenous families who have been stewards of these lands and waters since time immemorial.

My research draws on historical collections, field studies, and crowd-sourced biodiversity data, combined with environmental monitoring and remote sensing techniques, to analyse drivers of biodiversity change at multiple scales. I study a wide variety of organisms, linking ecological theory with observational studies to improve understanding of the trait-environment relationships underlying niche dynamics in space and time.

As an advocate for community science, I have a special interest in the development of frameworks supporting a networked, community-based approach to biodiversity research and monitoring. This work began with the Biodiversity Galiano project and continues through the organization I co-founded with friends and colleagues: the Institute for Multidisciplinary Ecological Research in the Salish Sea (IMERSS).