PHD Students

MSc Students

Undergraduate

Lucas Silva

Ph.D. student (current) Ecosystems dynamics and climate change, University of Guelph - ON.

M.Sc. (2007) Conservation and Management of Forest Resources, University of Brasilia - Brazil.

B.Sc. (2006) Forest Engineering, University of Brasilia-Brazil.

Lucas is Brazilian, living in Canada since 2008, enrolled at the GEC lab as a full time PhD student. His research interests focuses on forests and open vegetation ecotones. Current projects involve comparative ecology and long-term vegetation dynamics of Canadian and Brazilian ecotones by a range of approaches such as ecophysiology, population dynamics, soil-plant interactions and stable isotopes. Expected results will help to understand the mechanisms that determine ecosystems distribution in relation to changes in land use and climate.

Jennifer J. Babin-Fenske

Ph.D. (current) Boreal Ecology, Laurentian University - ON.

M.Sc. Biology, Laurentian University - ON

B.Sc. (Agr.), Applied Zoology, McGill University - QC

I am examining the compositional and structural changes in insect populations and communities in stressed forests. I will be using both empirical and theoretical data to uncover patterns in population dynamics, community structure and diversity. Part of my project focuses specifically on a major hardwood defoliator in Ontario, Canada, the forest tent caterpillar (Malacosoma disstria Hübner). It aims to develop a simulation model of the forest tent caterpillar (FTC) population dynamics in a stressed forest. This model will simulate observed trends in FTC population cycle and/or shed light on our understanding of spatiotemporal spread of FTC in a variety of different potential future scenarios of landscape disturbance. The potential applications of this model will include aiding in management of disturbed forests. This will be done by predicting future infestations of the FTC and determining the length of the outbreak, with or without further stressors such as climate change and fragmentation. The second part of my project examines the soil insect community in forests recovering from historic mining pollution, specifically in the region of Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. I will be examining sites along a stress gradient as well as rehabilitated sites that have been physically altered through liming, seeding or planting. I hope to clarify the relationships within insect communities to examine how they respond to this type of disturbance and how they recover post-disturbance. Any patterns that are uncovered will be useful for future restoration efforts as they may help determine the condition of the area or show which restoration techniques are most effective.

Mark Leithead

Ph.D. (current) Community Ecology of Forest Systems, University of Guelph - ON.

B.Sc. (2006) Honours Ecology Specialist, University of Toronto - ON.

How do forest communities respond to disturbance? Previous work has focused on the idea of a "climax" community, where regeneration approaches a peak ecosystem through succession over time. Ecologists today think of this peak instead as an "equilibrium", as peak communities have been observed to shift in species composition over time. When a community encounters a small-scale disturbance within an equilibrium phase, such as treefall gap formation or selective logging, there tends to be structured regeneration towards its equilibrium state. Large-scale disturbances, global warming as an example, can shift equilibrium from one community to another, resulting in a non-monotonic (non-directional) response. I attempt to document within-equilibrium and equilibrium-shift responses for forest systems in Canada and Brazil and throughout the world at varying scales of disturbance, testing what role species diversity may play in such community response dynamics.

Wolfgang Huettinger

M.Sc. (current) Individual-based Modelling of Forest Systems, University of Guelph - ON.

B.Sc.(Diploma thesis) (2009) Mathematics University of Bayreuth - Germany.

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