Fall 2018
  • Congratulations to Mike Rogers who successfully defended his MSc on December 12 (Title: One size does not fit all: Context specificity drives invasion in grassland plants.)! Great post-defense slash annual lab Christmas party!
  • The MacDougall Lab is hiring - PhD position in plant phenology and climate change in the high arctic, 4yrs, fully funded. Research can be ecology and/or evolution. Field work will take place in northern Scandinavia.
  • Congratulations to MSc student Aleksandra Dolezal on her oral presentations at the Entomological Society of America and Ontario Pest Management Conferences (Title: Local habitat characteristics drive arthropod assembly in agroecosystems). 

Summer 2018
  • Congratulations to MSc student Annalisa Mazzorato on her poster presentation at the 103rd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America (Title: Change happens from the ground up: Soil carbon storage on restored ALUS prairie grasslands).
  • Congratulations to MSc student Aleksandra Dolezal on her oral presentation at the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution Annual Meeting (Title: Farming with nature: using precision agriculture to rescue arthropod populations and provide ecosystem services).
  • Congratulations to MSc student Aleksandra Dolezal on her poster presentation at the 103rd Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America (Title: Farming with nature: using precision agriculture to rescue arthropod populations and provide ecosystem services).  
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​Spring 2018
  • Congratulations to MSc student Annalisa Mazzorato on her poster presentation at the 48th Ontario Ecology, Ethology, and Evolution Colloquium (OE3C) (Title: Change happens from the ground up: Soil carbon storage on restored ALUS prairie grasslands).
  • Congratulations to MSc student Annalisa Mazzorato on receiving an Arthur D. Latornell Travel Scholarship.
  • Congratulations to MSc student Annalisa Mazzorato on receiving a University of Guelph's Food From Thought Conference Bursary.

Winter 2018
  • Congratulations to MSc student Bernal Arce on receiving the College of Biological Science's Scholarship in Plant Science.

Fall 2017
  • Congratulations to MSc student Annalisa Mazzorato on receiving a Tallgrass Ontario Research Bursary.
  • Congratulations to MSc student Annalisa Mazzorato on receiving a Canada's First Research Excellence Award.

Fall 2016
  • Congratulations to Felicia Syer, who successfully defended her MSc thesis “Canopy gaps are hotspots for bees and rare plants in an oak savanna system of southern Ontario”.
  • Congratulations to Kathryn Tisshaw (undergraduate lab member) who recently completed an internship at the Archbold Biological Station in Florida, and is now working as a restoration ecology intern at Golden Gates National Park Conservancy in San Francisco CA.
  • Congratulations to Dr. Jenny McCune, who published her first Liber Ero postdoc paper in Journal of Applied Ecology “Species distribution models predict rare species occurrences despite significant effects of landscape context”. Jenny’s article received press coverage in The Waterloo Record, The Cambridge Times, and the University of Guelph news feed(“Guelph researcher uses computer model to pinpoint rare plants”).
  • Welcome to two new MSc students – AnnaLisa Mazzorato and Aleksandra Dolezal – who will both be exploring diversity-ecosystem services research on conventional farms in southern Ontario. Thanks to ALUS and OMAFRA for supporting their work!
  • Congratulations to MSc student Aleksandra Dolezal on receiving an OMAFRA HQP Graduate Scholarship (2016-2018).
  • Welcome to our four new undergraduate research students – Miki Tamblyn, Britney Firth, Rachel Carveth, and Dan Engelking. Each is exploring the impacts of trait variation on aspects of species coexistence and ecosystem resilience.
  • Welcome to Dr. Eric Lind (University of Minnesota) who is visiting our lab in late September. Eric will be giving a departmental seminar “Combining distributed experiments heterogeneous data, and hierarchical modelling for global inference in grassland ecology”.
  • Our Nutrient Network (NutNet) paper “Addition of multiple limiting resources reduces grassland diversity”, with Stan Harpole as lead PI, was published in Nature on September 1.

Summer 2016
  • Congratulations to Dr.Jenny McCune (Liber Ero postdoc) who was awarded a NSERC PDF for 2016-2018.
  • Congratulations to Erin McCloskey, who was awarded the Bryant Family scholarship for undergradaute research in the Dept of Integrative biology.
  • Congratulations to Sean Hudson, Aly Van Natto, and Erin McCloskey, who each successfully defended their undergraduate thesis projects!
  • Congratulations to Aleksandra Dolezal (University of Toronto) who was awarded a two year OMAFRA HQP scholarship, to conduct MSc research in our lab.
  • Welcome to Miki Tamblyn (NSERC USRA) and Jocelyn Kelly, who will be working in the lab this summer.

Winter 2015/2016
  • Congratulations to Kathryn Tisshaw, who successful defended her undergraduate thesis project and who has now been hired as a research assistant with Dr. Eric Menges at the Archibold Biological Station in Florida.
  • Congratulations to Morgan Randall, who successfully defended her MSc thesis on the effects of drought-eutrophication feedbacks on grassland plant and insect communities.
  • Congratulations to Dr. Eric Harvey, whose third PhD chapter “Spatially heterogeneous perturbations homogenize the regulation of insect herbivores”, has been published in American Naturalist.
  • Our Nutrient Network (NutNet) paper “Integrative modelling reveals mechanisms linking productivity and plant species richness”, lead by Jim Grace, has been published in Nature.
  • Our 18 ha experimental burn at the RARE Charitable Research Reserve was successfully completed in April 2015, conducted by Lands and Forests consulting. This work is testing how large-and small-scale factors relating to species interactions, environmental filters, and dispersal combine to shape population- and community-level processes in our experimental system. 
Summer 2015
  • Congratulations to Dr. Eric Harvey, who was awarded the Gold Medal for best thesis in the College of Biological Sciences at the University of Guelph for 2015!
  • Congratulations to Dr. Jenny McCune who was awarded research funding from the Federal (Science Horizons) and Provincial (Endangered Species Stewardship) governments for 2015-2016 for her research on rare plant modeling in southern Ontario.
  • Collaborative work with the Nutrient Network will soon be published in Nature Communications (Seabloom et al. 2015) and Nature Plant (Fay et al. 2015).
  • Congratulations to Caitlin Paterson (MSc),who will be starting her PhD research at the University of Toronto in the fall of 2015.
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Winter/Spring 2015)
  • Congratulations to Dr. Eric Harvey, who successfully defended his PhD thesis on meta-community dynamics and the assembly of insect foodwebs. Eric is now a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Florian Altermatt – University of Zurich.
  • Welcome to Erin McKlusky and Sean Hudson,who will be joining the lab as summer research technicians, and conducting undergraduate research theses on aspects of plant-pollinator dynamics in endangered oak savanna of southwestern Ontario.
  • Congratulations to Alisha Duwyn, whose MSc research paper on oak recruitment failure was published in the Journal of Ecology.

Fall 2014
  • Congratulations to Caitlin Paterson, who successfully defended her MSc thesis on plant-pollinator interactions on conventional farms!!
  • Welcome to Drew Anthony (SMU BSc) and Felicia Syer (Guelph BSc) who have joined the lab as MSc candidates. Drew plans to work on the relative impacts of intra- and interspecific trait variation on community assembly. Felicia plans to work on scale-dependent regulators of plant-pollinator dynamics in anthropogenically transformed oak savanna.
  • Welcome to Kathryn Tisshaw, who is conducting a BSc research thesis in our lab. Her work is testing how drought and eutrophication interact to affect plant production in species-rich grassland.
  • Congratualtions to Eric Harvey, who will be submitting his PhD thesis for defense in the fall. Eric will be starting a postdoctoral position at the University of Zurich in 2015.
  • Eric Harvey’s paper “Isolation and insect attack in recruiting oaks” has been accepted for publication by the American Midland Naturalist.
  • Suzanne Prober’s Nutrient Network (NutNet) paper “Plant diversity predicts beta diversity but not alpha diversity of soil microbes in grasslands worldwide” has been accepted in Ecology Letters.

Summer 2014
  • Congratulations to Mike Rogers, who was awarded on OGS scholarship for 2014-2015.
  • Congratulations to Felica Syer (incoming MSc – fall 2014), who has been hired at Pinery Provincial Park for summer 2014. This work will include establishing a large-scale experiment on plant-pollinator dynamics in the park, which will form the basis of her MSc research.
  • Caitlin Paterson will be presenting her MSc work on pollinator dynamics in agricultural landscapes at the Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution meeting in Montreal in late May 2014.
  • Eric Harvey presented his third thesis chapter “Multivariate drivers of consumer diversity in degraded landscapes” at the Ontario Ecology, Evolution, and Ethology conference, held in Guelph in early May 2014. He will also present this talk in August at the ESA annual conference – Sacramento, California.
  • Welcome to Drew Anthony, who will be joining our lab (MSc) this fall. Drew has been awarded a two-year MSc CBS Graduate Scholarship from the University of Guelph.

Winter/Spring 2014
  • Congratulations to Eric Harvey, whose first PhD chapter has been published in Ecology (“Trophic island biogeography drives spatial divergence in community establishment”). 
  • Congratulations to Morgan Randall, who was awarded an Ontario Graduate Scholarship for 2014-2015.
  • A big welcome to Jenny McCune, who was awarded a Liber Ero postdoctoral fellowship (http://liberero.ca/) and will be joining our lab this spring. Jenny will be building habitat suitability models and collaborating with landowners to improve the conservation of rare woodland plants on private lands in Southern Ontario.
  • Welcome to Tim Skuse, Kathryn Tisshaw, Jenny Caws, and Amber Lammers, who will be working as field technicians in our lab this summer.
  • Congratulations to Eric Harvey and Mike Rogers, who were awarded Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Scholarships in Science and Technology.
  • Congratulations to Aurelie Thebault, whose postdoctoral project in our lab has been accepted by Journal of Ecology.
  • Congratulations to Stefan Schneider, who successfully defended his MSc thesis!
  • Congratulations to Emily Drystek, whose undergraduate research paper has been accepted by the journal Basic and Applied Ecology. Emily is currently completing her MSc. at the University of Toronto.
  • Welcome back Jenny Caws, Amber Lammers, and Julia Kreiner, who are once again working as undergraduate research technicians in the lab.

Native Pollinators on Conventional Farms – southern Ontario
Caitlin Paterson (MSc) has completed her first year of research, examining the influence of habitat complexity on the diversity and distribution of native pollinators on conventional farms in southern Ontario. This work is being conducted in close collaboration with ALUS (http://www.norfolkalus.com/), and their support is greatly appreciated! Thanks to Felicia Syer, April Clyburne-Sherin, Cara Bulger, and Alex Smith at the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario for assistance with species IDs.

Small Mammal Prairie Research
Stefan Schneider (MSc) has completed his research project on small mammal dynamics at our Blair Flats tallgrass prairie site, at the RARE Scientific Research Reserve near Cambridge, Ontario. 

Fall 2013
  • Congratulations to Eric Harvey, who was awarded an FQRNT PhD Research Scholarship!
  • Congratulations to former lab members April Clyburne-Sherin (University of Guelph) and Cara Bulger (York University), who have entered MSc research programs for fall 2013.
  • Welcome to Jenny Caws, Amber Lammers, Julia Kreiner, Erica Harvey, Meghan Douglas, Veronica Stach, Gen Pintel, Rachel Wiles, Mike Dagg, Alice Pintaric, and Gubby Kovacs,who are all working in our lab this fall!
  • Congratulations to former lab member Rachel Germain, who has started her PhD at the University of Toronto. Congratulations to former lab member Sarah Pinto, who successfully defended her PhD thesis at the University of Montana! Congratulations to fomer lab member Carly Ziter who successfully defended her MSc thesis at McGill University!

Spring/Summer 2013
  • Welcome to Morgan Randall (UAlberta) and Mike Rogers(WesternU), who will be starting their MSc research projects this September. Congratulations to Morgan, who was awarded an NSERC MSc scholarship.
  • Congratulations to Natalie Jones, whose MSc paper “Reproductive system of a mixed-mating plant responds to climate perturbation by increased selfing” has been published by the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B.
  • Congratulations to Eric Harvey, who was awarded the RARE research fellowship for 2013-2014
  • Big congratulations to Stefan Schneider, whose talk at the Ontario Ecology, Ethology, and Evolution Conference was awarded best graduate student oral presentation.
  • Congratulations to Eric Harvey and Stefan Schneider, who gave well-received talks at the RARE research colloquium, the Ontario Ecology, Ethology, and Evolution Conference – University of Western Ontario, and the Ecological Society of America Conference in Minneapolis, MN.
  • Congratulations to April Clyburne-Sherin and Nathan Decarlo, who successfully defended their undergraduate thesis projects.
  • Thanks to Dr. Jennifer Firn, Queensland University of Technology, for hosting a magnificant visit to Brisbane and to central Queensland during my sabbatical!
  • Some press releases concerning our recent paper:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/02/06/technology-fire-biodiversity-loss.html
http://www.uoguelph.ca/news/2013/02/post_236.html
http://www.natureconservancy.ca/en/feature-stories/the-force-of-fire.html
http://margaretmunro.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/exposing-a-devils-bargain/
http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/journal/some-plants-dont-regenerate-after-bushfire.htm
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Winter 2012/2013
  • Congratulations to Laura Johnson and Rachel Germain, whose complimentary undergraduate research projects have been accepted as a research paper by American Naturalist. Stefan Schneider (MSc) is also a co-author on this paper.
  • Welcome to April Clyburne-Sherin, Nathan DeCarlo, Cara Bulger, Felicia Syer, and Jennifer Chapman, who have joined the lab for 2013.
  • Congratulations to Pauline Priadka and Katie Cook, who successfully defended their undergraduate thesis projects.
  • Congratulations to Emily Drystek (field technician – summer 2011), who has started her MSc with the Ben Gilbert lab at the University of Toronto.
  • Our paper “Diversity loss with persistent human disturbance increases vulnerability to ecosystem collapse” has been accepted by Nature, to be published in 2013.

Fall 2012
  • Congratulations to Carly Ziter, whose undergraduate thesis paper “Nutrients and defoliation increase soil carbon inputs in grassland” has been accepted by Ecology. Carly is now doing her MSc at McGill University with Andy Gonzalez and Elena Bennett.
  • Welcome to Caitlin Paterson (MSc), who will be examining plant-pollinator dynamics in fragmented grassland of southwestern Ontario. Congratulations also to Caitlin on being awarded a two year OMAFRA scholarship that will support her research.

Spring/Summer 2012
  • Congratulations to Stefan Schneider who was awarded a $4,000 research scholarship from the RARE charitable research reserve.
  • Welcome to Caitlin Paterson and Rachael Derbyshire, who have joined the lab as summer research technicians for 2012.
  • Thanks to Mountain Equipment Co-op for supporting our research on tallgrass prairie restoration, through the MEC Environment Research Fund.

Winter 2011/2012
  • Congratulations to Ashley Leifso, whose paper “Expansion of a globally pervasive grass occurs without substantial trait differences between home and way populations” has been accepted by Oecologia. Many thanks to our co-authors and collaborators Brian Husband, Jose “Pepe” Hierro, Meelis Partel, Martin Koechy, and Duane Peltzer.
  • Congratulations to Paul Richardson, whose paper “Inversion of domiance-diversity relationships along a latitudinal stress gradient” has been accepted by Ecology. Many thanks to our co-authors and collaborators Amanda Stanley, Tom Kaye, and Peter Dunwiddie.
  • Congratulations to Paul Richardson, whose paper “Fine-scale spatial heterogeneity and incoming seed diversity additively determine plant establishment” has been accepted by the Journal of Ecology.
  • Mariana Chiuffo will be presenting her research at the 2nd World Conference on Biological Invasions and Ecosystem Functioning on November 21-24 2011, Mar del Plata, Argentina. Her presentation is titled ‘Exotics  vs. natives:  soil feedbacks and competition in caldén woodland, central Argentina’, with greenhouse work conducted in 2010 at the University of Guelph.

Tallgrass restoration – Ontario
Two years after planting, community assembly at our tallgrass prairie research facility on the RARE conservation preserve is well under-way.

MSc position 2012-2014: Metacommunity Dynamics and Community Assembly
A fully funded MSc position is now available in our research group, starting September 2012. We seek a student with broad interests in community ecology, food webs dynamics, or insect or plant ecology. The student’s work will be a part of a larger scale experimental project, which aims to understand the impact of environmental and spatial constrains on the community assembly and succession of grassland food webs (producers, herbivores, predators, pollinators). There is room for creativity, and as such the student will be encouraged to build their own project depending on interests and background. Please send a copy of your C.V., unofficial transcript, and a short statement on your research interests to amacdo02@uoguelph.ca Position Filled – thanks to all applicants.

Prescribed burns – British Columbia
Our second year of prescribed burning at the Cowichan Garry Oak preserve (Nature Conservancy of Canada) has been successfully completed. We are testing the interactive effects of fire and trophic collapse on plant diversity in the Garry Oak ecosystem. Thanks to Dr. Irvin Banman who organized and carried out all steps of the process!

Fall 2011
Summer 2011
  • Rachel Germain is presenting at the Ecological Society of America conference in Austin, Texas – “Spatial variability in granivory determines the strength of stochastic community assembly”.
  • Welcome to Eric Harvey (PhD) and Stefan Schneider (MSc), who will be joining the lab in fall 2011.
  • Congratulations to Carly Ziter, who has been awarded the School of Environmental Sciences Academic Prize and the U of Guelph Beth Duncan Gold Medal, and will be starting her MSc in the Department of Biology at McGill University in September 2011(Gonzalez/Bennett labs).
  • Jesse Harnden’s paper “Field-based effects of allelopathy in invaded tallgrass prairie” is currently the second most downloaded paper at the journalBotany.

Spring 2011
  • Welcome to Aurelie Thebault (Postdoc – EPFL, Switzerland), who will be working on issues of climate change, belowground dynamics, and plant invasion in degraded grassland.
  • Welcome to Emily Drystek, Laura Johnson, and Carly Ziter, who will be undergraduate research technicians this summer [in some cases for a second time!].
  • Congratulations to Marina Neytcheva, who was awarded a NSERC Vanier scholarship ($50,000 per annum).
  • Congratulations to Rachel Germain, who will be starting her MSc in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (Ben Gilbert lab), University of Toronto in September.

Winter 2011
  • Congratulations to Carly Ziter who was awarded a NSERC Alexander Graham Bell scholarship, and the ‘best oral presentation’ award at the Ontario Biology Day conference.
  • Jenn Firn’s Ecology Letters paper has been given a ‘must read’ recommendation on the F1000 website
  • Our paper “Weak conspecific feedbacks and exotic dominance in a species-rich savanna” has been accepted by the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B (with Matthias Rillig and John Klironomos).
  • Congratulations to Jenn Firn, whose paper “Abundance of introduced species at home predicts abundance away in herbaceous communities” has just been published in Ecology Letters. A write-up can be found on the NSF website: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=118397&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click
  • Congratulations to Jesse Harnden, whose undergraduate thesis project “Field-based effects of allelopathy in invaded tallgrass prairie” has been accepted for publication by the journal Botany [formerly Canadian Journal of Botany].
  • Congratulations to Rachel Germain, who has been hired as a research assistant in Ben Gilbert’s lab at the University of Toronto (Jan 2011).

Fall 2010
  • Congratulations to Carly Ziter, who has been awarded the 2010-2011 Integrative Biology Research Thesis Scholarship [the Bryant Family Research Scholarship]. Carly’s research is examining resource-consumer impacts on grassland root dynamics and carbon cycling.
  • Congratulations to Ashley Leifso and Natalie Jones, who successfully defended their MSc research projects in September.
  • Congratulations to Natalie Jones, who will be starting her PhD in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (Ben Gilbert lab), University of Toronto in January.
  • A fond farewell to Mariana Chiuffo, who completed her nine month research term in our lab and has returned to resume her PhD work in Argentina at the University of Buenos Aires (Jose Hierro lab).
  • Congratulations to Marina Neytcheva, who was awarded a UG College of Biological Sciences PhD Award ($100,000 over four years).

Welcome to Marina Neytcheva – PhD Fall 2010
Welcome to Marina Neytcheva (MSc St. Marys), who will be joining the MacDougall and Cottenie labs starting in Fall 2010. 

Summer 2010
  • Welcome to Laura Johnson, who is joining our lab as an undergraduate research technician for late summer 2010, and who will be conducting a research project on granivory and community assembly in the fall.
  • Congratulations to Alisha Duwyn and Natalie Jones for their co-authored paper appearing in the July edition of Ecology (“Consumer-based limitations drive oak recruitment failure” 97: 2092-2099).
  • Ashley Leifso, Alisha Duwyn, Natalie Jones, and Paul Richardson will be presenting posters or papers at the upcoming ESA conference in Pittsburgh.
  • Natalie Jones gave a paper at the Canadian Botanical Association conference in Ottawa in late June.
  • Our paper “the Invasive grass Agropyron cristatum doubles below ground productivity but not soil carbon” (MacDougall and Scott Wilson) accepted by Ecology.

We have ignition…
Our planted prairie at the RARE site near Cambridge, Ontario is underway…Thanks to Mathis Natvik and Peter Kelly for their assistance.
  • Thanks to Jenn Firn, as well as Yvonne Buckely, Susanne Schmidt, and the rest of the UQ folks for hosting an enjoyable visit to Brisbane last week. Nice poster. Thanks also to Jos Moore for arranging my stay here in the Botany Department at the University of Melbourne (and for taking me to the Hawthorn football game at the MCG – Go Hawks).

“As sheep advance, flowers, vegetation, grass, soil, plenty, and poetry vanish” – John Muir (1893)

Grasslands evolved with grazing and fire, yet the influences of both processes have fundamentally changed over the last 150+ years. Some systems are overgrazed, while others lack grazing altogether. The effects of fire suppression range from tree infilling to the increased occurrence of periodic catastrophic burns due to high fuel loads . We are exploring the implications of these changes for grassland structure and function, using a series of long-term fire and herbivory experiments on Vancouver Island and the southern Gulf islands of British Columbia. This includes testing the relative impacts of native and introduced grazers on diversity and community assembly, and how burning and grazing combine to influence the demographics of disturbance-dependent plant species. To Muir’s horror (we assume), this includes grazing trials with sheep… (managed by Irvin Banman of the Nature Conservancy of Canada).

Welcoming our newest lab member…
One of our research interests is how metacommunity dynamics underlie the assembly and functioning of species-rich systems. We are excited to welcome a shiny new tractor, which will help us initiate the assembly of oak savanna communities in sites currently occupied by old-field on Vancouver Island. Funding support provided by CFI-LOF, with significant in-kind contributions from the Nature Conservancy of Canada.

New Research on Tumbo Island, Gulf Islands National Park 2010
We will be starting a long-term collaborative research experiment this spring on Tumbo Island in the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve(below, in the shadow of Mt. Baker). This project will be run in association with Mark Vellend’s lab at the University of British Columbia and Marlow Pellatt at Parks Canada. Graduate student opportunities for highly qualified candidates (PhD) may soon be available; please contact us if you are interested.

Spring 2010
  • Congratulations to Sarah Pinto (former MSc) on being awarded an NSERC PGS-D scholarship, and for the publication of her first MSc paper in the American Naturalist (June 2010).
  • Congratulations to Alisha Duwyn (current MSc) on being awarded an Ontario Government Scholarship.
  • Welcome to Carly Ziter and Rachel Germain, who are joining our lab as undergraduate research technicians for summer 2010.

Visit by Trevor Herriot
Our lab will be welcoming award-winning author Trevor Herriot to Guelph on Monday March 15th 2010, for a reading and slide-show presentation at The Bookshelf. Thanks to the School of Environmental Sciences for helping to sponsor Trevor’s visit.

PhD position 2011-2014: Metacommunity Dynamics and Community Assembly
Metacommunity dynamics should play a critical role in the assembly of plant communities, based on the potential influences of dispersal, source-sink dynamics, stochastic factors, and trait-based species sorting over time. Using combined experimental, demographic, and statistical approaches, we plan to isolate the relative influence of these factors with a unique large-scale (40 acre), long-term assembly experiment in tallgrass prairie in southern Ontario. We seek a highly-motivated PhD candidate with a strong theoretical and field-based empirical background to use this project as the basis for their dissertation research, starting late 2010 or 2011. The candidate must have experience preparing and, ideally, submitting at least one manuscript to a peer-reviewed ecology-based journal, be capable of working both independently and collaboratively, and be interested in connections between theoretical and applied issues in conservation biology. The direction and scope of the student’s research will be self-determined based on the candidate’s interests and background. Possible topics include (but are not limited to): whether population, community, and ecosystem-level responses to metacommunity processes are synergistically linked or unfold independently during assembly; whether producer, herbivore, and predator responses are synergistically linked or unfold independently during assembly; the degree to which the relative strengths of metacommunity processes vary at different stages of assembly; whether the size, shape, and connectivity of metacommunity patches influence their stability and functioning; and how extrinsic influences associated with climate change, fire, and herbivory deflect or intensify assembly trajectories. The successful student will be remunerated with a combination of fellowships, research or teaching assistantships, with funding guaranteed for three years. Please submit a letter of interest and CV including undergrad and MSc grades to Dr. Andrew MacDougall, Department of Integrative Biology.

  • Congratulations to Mariana Chiuffo (Ph. D candidate with Dr. Jose Hierro, Universidad Nacional de La Pampa, Argentina), who has been awarded a research grant from the Emerging Leaders in the Americas (ELAP) program. Funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (Canada), this grant will allow Mariana to join our lab in 2010. Her work on invasion biogeography, plant competition, and neutral-based priority effects will be centered in Las Pampas grasslands of central Argentina and climatically analagous grasslands in Canada.

Spring 2009
  • Recent article published on our fire work at the Cowichan Garry Oak Reserve, Nature Conservancy of Canada.
 
PhD position: Spatial Processes in Deciduous Forest Understories
Drs. Karl Cottenie and Andrew MacDougall
Department of Integrative Biology
University of Guelph
Understory plant communities of the eastern deciduous forest of North America are extensively studied but remain poorly understood due to the complexity of limiting processes that affect their member species. Emerging evidence points to the importance of spatial distance and environmental heterogeneity, but how these factors vary by spatial scale, site history, phylogenetic relatedness, latitude, and isolation distance is unclear. We seek a highly motivated PhD student to examine these issues using trait-based, statistical, and experimental approaches in deciduous forest understories of southern Ontario, Canada. These understories are diversity hotspots in Canada, containing large numbers of rare and endangered plants. Their declines are well-described but the causal mechanisms are elusive, giving this study theoretical and applied significance. Interested applicants should ideally have an MSc in ecology, biogeography, or statistical biology, with field experience including experimental approaches and plant identification. The successful student will be remunerated with a combination of fellowships, research or teaching assistantships, with funding guaranteed for three years. POSITION FILLED – THANKS TO ALL APPLICANTS
University of Guelph, Department of Integrative Biology
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