TALK: Wed., May 28 9:30-9:45 am "Would you like carbon or chimpanzees with that? Biodiversity and ecosystem services in African tropical rainforest" 

POSTER: Tues., May 27 4-6 pm "Evidence for Democracy: Scientists advocating for science integrity and evidence-based policies", co-authored with Dr. Dom Roche and Dr. Katie Gibbs

Are you a current McGill graduate student? Interested in sustainability, climate change, and science policy? If so, the Sustainable Canada Dialogues invites you to a one-day visioning workshop.
          
Date/Time: Thursday, May 15, 2014, 9 am - 4 pm (refreshments & lunch provided)
Location: Room W2/3A, Stewart building, 1205 Dr. Penfield Ave., McGill, Montreal

This interactive workshop is one of the first in a series with diverse stakeholders across Canada. In this session, we seek input from McGill graduate students on:

• What are the main priorities for you and for your family, community, and region re: sustainability (i.e., social, environmental, economic, and/or cultural sustainability)?
• In 20 years, where would you like to be, personally and as a nation, re: sustainability?
• What are strategies or steps would help reach this vision for the future? 
• What do you think are key concerns and strengths re: sustainability across Canada? 
• What can individuals, institutions, and governments do to increase sustainability?

Your participation will inform the development of evidence-based recommendations to politicians and policy-makers regarding sustainability strategies in Canada. You do not need special experience or prior knowledge of sustainability or policy issues. Your participation will add important perspectives and experiences on possible futures for Canada.  

To register, fill in this online form before Monday, May 12. Please contact me for more information.  Use the hashtag #SustainableCAN to follow the workshops across Canada. 

About the Sustainable Canada Dialogues

The Sustainable Canada Dialogues (SCD) is a new Canadian working group dedicated to developing evidence-based recommendations to integrate sustainability principles and processes into federal policy. It is an effort to harness the unique opportunity for Canadian scholars to contribute to the social discussion of fundamental environmental issues in Canada, and will target positive action as a means to stimulate conversation around sustainability.  

The first phase of the SCD plan includes synthesizing and diffusing expertise from a broad range of Canadian sectors regarding their impact on the environment and climate change. Following, we are planning a participatory collaboration with various stakeholders across Canada to envision a sustainable future, and to build a portfolio of possible avenues of attaining this vision of a sustainable Canada.

We work with diverse stakeholders across Canada to:

1. Develop tangible, non-partisan recommendations for the 2015 federal election, and
2. Provide a comprehensive recommendations for Canada for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change summit in December 2015. 

SCD is led by Dr. Catherine Potvin, UNESCO-McGill Chair in Dialogues on Sustainability (McGill) and guided by a Scientific Committee composed of Drs. Fikret Berkes (UManitoba), Sally Aitken (UBC), Heather MacLean (UofT), Mark Stoddart (Memorial), and Chantelle Richmond (Western).  I sit on the outreach committee.

One of the things I love about working at a university is learning about research through campus seminar series - and now it's my turn!

I've been a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Coastal Research at Vancouver Island University since September 2012.  Everyone at VIU has been really good to me during my stays in Nanaimo! It's such a welcoming environment and I've been fortunate to be involved in some of their research, like the Protected Areas and Poverty Reduction project. I'm looking forward to sharing some of my doctoral research with everyone. It's a public talk so everyone is welcome!

Bring your LUNCH AND LEARN about research at VIU! 
Tuesday, April 22 from 12 pm-1 pm
ICR Lounge, 4th floor of Building 305 (the library building, just north of the bus loop)
Vancouver Island University, 900 Fifth Street, Nanaimo, BC 

"People and monkeys and trees, oh my! Restoring biodiversity and ecosystem services in an African tropical rainforest"
 
Conserving tropical rainforests seems like a conundrum. Tropical rainforests are home to more than half the planet’s biodiversity and provide vital ecosystem services that humanity depends on. But human activities like logging and farming destroy or degrade vast areas of rainforest every year. Restoring rainforest is critical for conserving biodiversity and providing ecosystem services, but restoration can be difficult, expensive, and slow. In this talk, Aerin will explore how past and present human activities affect the recovery of rainforest and wildlife in western Uganda’s Kibale National Park. She investigates contrasting changes in habitat inside and outside the national park, the potential for exotic species to accelerate native forest regeneration, and interactions between forest regeneration and primate and elephant populations. Although conflicts arise between different elements of biodiversity and ecosystem services, this is a rare case of finding win-win scenarios in natural resource management.

If you want to see change, you gotta be part of making change.  I nominated four outstanding Canadian women for the 2014 A Bold Vision initiative, a meeting of 23 outstanding women in Canada.  I'm taking a leaf from Dawn Bazely's example (see here and here) by posting about why I think they are terrific candidates. Click on their names to read the full  nomination.

Update: Turns out that I was nominated too!  

Here is my plea for YOU to nominate terrific people for awards - and to encourage people to self-nominate!  Scroll down to the bottom of this page to see some awards in science, social justice, conservation, and more. Please consider diversity of all types when you think of nominees. 

I got such a kick out of seeing wildlife through remote cameras, and these videos from coastal British Columbia are great. They were taken in the "Great Bear Rainforest" (aka BC's Central and North Coast), a huge stretch of temperate rainforest on Canada's west coast running from northern Vancouver Island to southeast Alaska. Wildlife are plentiful and people have lived there for millennia, but the region really sprang onto the world stage in the last decade or so. It's an amazing place - and it's where I hope to do postdoctoral research!

Remote cameras let scientists study wildlife from afar. Using these and other non-invasive methods of research, we can minimize the impact of research on animal behaviour. But Remote cameras aren't entirely without impact - they can inadvertently affect animals - so we need to be careful how, when, and where they are used.

This last video isn't about remote cameras - it's about Norm Hann's stand-up paddleboard trip through the Great Bear Rainforest, following the route of the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines project. His goal was to highlight First Nations culture and traditional food harvest and the threat that an oil spill would have on local people, wildlife, and the environment. (Go to 32:00 to see my friend Chris Williamson's project making cedar stand-up paddleboards with students at the Bella Bella Community School - also covered by National Geographic!)

My second foray into the blogosphere with Montreal's Ecosystems at Your Service. This story is about how resolving a neighbourhood disagreement about whether or not to remove a tree growing beside my apartment building in Montreal. We had an arborist assess the health of our tree and how it could be pruned to reduce potential damage to the building foundation. 

I learned a lot about urban trees by researching and writing this story. I didn't know that having trees in neighbourhoods reduces speeding, lowers blood pressure, and increases business revenue. Montreal has some great municipal policies regarding urban trees; I'm really glad that those policies made us have an arborist assess (and save!) ours. 

My first blog post over at Montreal's Ecosystems at Your Service!  I'm really pleased to be part of such a cool project, aiming to connect Montrealers with Nature through story-telling.  

I like science outreach that uses unusual and creative methods to make their message stick with each audience. The good folks at Minute Earth make short (2-3 minute) YouTube videos explaining all manner of science-y things, from freezer burn to bed bugs, or why some countries drive on the left vs. the right side of the road. This time they tackle niches, competition, and coexistence using the analogy of microbreweries.  

Here's their basic question: How can little specialist plants (read: microbreweries) survive in a world dominated by big competitive trees (read: macrobreweries)?

Here's their answer: "By capturing the most valuable resources before they reach others, dominant trees and companies exclude weaker competitors who employ the same tactics.  But there are trade-offs in any strategies, and being the best on average rarely works in all cases and conditions.  That's how understorey ferns and microbreweries can succeed, by specialising in conditions the big guys aren't so good at -- the so-called empty niches... Where there are resources, there is the potential to survive. So it's not really surprising that both nature and the economy, driven by the same kinds of competition, give rise to niches and diversification, in the canopy and understorey, in the forest and supermarket aisle."

I'll toast to that!  And with some great organic microbreweries and wineries to boot!