“What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make. ” ― Jane Goodall |
Documenting the effects of existing landscape management practices on freshwater biodiversity and ecosystem service provision. Using a combination of existing and field-based data my research investigates how anthropogenic development (e.g. forestry, agriculture, industry and associated infrastructure) affects watershed biodiversity and ecosystem services across broad landscapes. I am also interested the effects of actions taken to help conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services (e.g. assigning protection status to a particular region, implementing policies to reduce environmental impacts). The findings from this research help shed light on trade-offs and synergies associated to current management practices, and what actions can be taken to minimize trade-offs, all the while promoting sustainable and equitable ecosystem service provision, and biodiversity conservation.
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Working with stakeholders and community members to facilitate the co-development of locally relevant environmental management strategies. Working with inter-disciplinary teams to combine mixed methodologies inspired from social and ecological sciences, I collaboratively conduct research that engages stakeholders and community members to better understand how they benefit from the landscapes they live in, and what actions can be taken to improve those benefits, all the while conserving biodiversity. The findings from this research can help identify positive pathways toward more sustainable and equitable futures. To ensure the relevance of these research findings, in this type of project, I work with communities from start to finish to determine locally relevant objectives, participants, methods, and outputs. If this kind of work is of interest to you or an organization you are working with, don't hesitate to reach out!
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Developing immersive multi-disciplinary educational approaches to connect diverse people to social-ecological systems management. For research about social-ecological systems to have a positive impact, people need to care about it. Immersive experiential educational experiences can help achieve that goal, but there is still much work to do in developing and implementing approaches that help connect youth to research in meaningful ways that are adapted to the specific contexts those youth live in. Working collaboratively with the Matawa Education and Care Centre, based out of Thunder Bay, I help facilitate research on freshwater ecosystems in the territories of Matawa First Nations. This research focuses on working with Matawa youth to collect meaningful social-ecological data for collaborating Matawa First Nations, all the while developing effective land-based approaches to teach environmental sciences. The approaches rely on a combination of Indigenous Ecological Knowledge and Western scientific knowledge and have strong potential to help inform science-education strategies in other contexts, including University education.
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