Biodiversity

As the most likely origin of life, it is not surprising that the majority of global biodiversity can be found in the world’s oceans. The waters off the coast of British Columbia offer an exquisite setting to study biodiversity as its geological history has created a complex environment that hosts an astonishing marine biodiversity. With a broad range of species providing different ecosystem services, biodiversity is crucial for a functioning ecosystem that ultimately provides ecosystem services to mankind from fisheries to stabilizing the climate. Nevertheless, global marine biodiversity is under threat from anthropogenic factors ranging from overexploitation, habitat loss and degradation, pollution and climate change. Therefore, it is imperative to assess and understand marine biodiversity in order to preserve these ecosystem services for future generations.

Research at UBC stretches from cataloging and understanding biodiversity at all levels, to efforts to conserve it. Marine biodiversity, which is still insufficiently understood, is explored from the smallest microorganisms (Suttle, Hallam, Keeling, Leander, Wegener Parfrey, Martone) that build the base of the food web, up to the macroscopic ecosystems (Lewis, Harley, Hunt, Lindstrom). Using state of the art methods,  factors that drive and maintain biodiversity such as the roles that ecosystem engineers and keystone species play are explored in a wide range of systems  (Christensen, Harley, Hunt, O’Connor, Richardson, Schulte, Taylor, Trites). Finally, the benefits of rich biodiversity to society are explored (Chan, Pauly).

 

Kai Chan

Professor
IRES; Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences
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Themes within Chan’s lab include ecosystem services and biodiversity; the ecological and evolutionary underpinnings of invasions and infestations; and applied environmental ethics. Current research looks at social-ecological systems and how to improve the understanding and implementation of these systems in governance. Through analysis and modelling, the limitations, impacts and risks to ecosystem services are explored.

 

William Cheung

Professor and Director; Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Ocean Sustainability and Global Change
Institute for Oceans and Fisheries
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The Changing Ocean Research Unit studies the effects of global climate and ocean changes on marine ecosystems, biodiversity and fisheries social-ecological systems. Led by Dr. William Cheung, the Unit assesses the biophysical and socio-economic vulnerabilities and impacts of marine climate change, and identifies mitigation and adaptation options. Its vision is “Predicting the future ocean under climate change”. Mission is to improve understanding of the past, current and future responses of marine ecosystems and fisheries to global change; and explore and inform policy-relevant solutions at local and global scales to improve human well-being and the sustainable use of ocean biodiversity and ecosystem services. Its strategies are to integrate multidisciplinary datasets and information across scales and domains, and facilitate democratization of knowledge through innovative partnerships, capacity building and outreach initiatives; and to apply and develop scenarios and models to understand the dynamics of changing oceans and ecosystems.

 

Villy Christensen

Professor
Zoology; Institute for Oceans and Fisheries
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Christensen specializes in ecosystem modelling—in particular, data-driven ecosystem model construction. Past work has described global ocean models, studied global fish biomass and biodiversity trends in relation to seafood demand, and outlined new habitat capacity models.

 

Steven Hallam

Associate Professor
Microbiology
Departmental Website and Laboratory Website
Email

The Hallam lab harnesses the power of environmental genomics to explore the microbial microcosms, describing microbial community structure and function across a wide range of ecosystems. Projects share a core set of interdisciplinary tools sourced from ecology, molecular biology, genetics and computer science. Microbial community members are viewed as constituents within the ecosystem providing nutritional, energetic or detoxification services.

 

Christopher Harley

Professor
Zoology
Departmental Website and Laboratory Website
Email

Harley’s lab researches coastal marine ecology and the impacts of climate change which include themes such as ocean acidification, thermal stress and global warming, climate change and salinity stress, the ecology of invasive species, and long-term ecological stress. Harley’s interests lie in how climatic factors, such as temperature, CO2, and pH, and biological relationships, such as predation and facilitation, interact to create ecological patterns in time and space.

 

 

Brian Hunt

Assistant Professor
Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries
Website and Publications
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Hunt researches the structure and function of pelagic marine ecosystems and their response to climate forcing and anthropogenic impacts. Research focuses on the plankton that forms the base of all pelagic food webs and extends into the higher trophic levels through research into bottom-up and top-down forcing processes. Unifying concepts of lower trophic level dynamics can inform our understanding of the food web response to perturbation.

 

Patrick Keeling

Professor
Botany
Departmental WebsiteLaboratory Website, and Publications
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The Keeling laboratory works is on the molecular evolution of protists (i.e. eukaryotes that are not animals, fungi, or plants), that comprise the clear majority of eukaryotic diversity. The main interests are to reconstruct ancient evolutionary relationships, to look at the diversity and ecology of heterotrophic eukaryotes, to examine how parasites evolve and infect their hosts, and how endosymbiosis affects both host and symbionts.

 

Brian Leander

Professor
Botany
Laboratory Website, and Publications
Email

Our research concentrates on the discovery and characterization of marine organismal diversity and comparative studies of novel morphological systems in predatory eukaryotes (i.e., marine zoology & protistology). We are fundamentally interested in the diversity and evolution of organisms, particularly traits associated with feeding, locomotion and symbiotic interactions. By addressing specific hypotheses about trait evolution using comparative molecular methods, we study the innovations and transformations associated with broad patterns of organismal diversity (e.g., convergent evolution over vast phylogenetic distances). This exploratory approach is motivated by the thrill of discovery, the beautiful and the bizarre, and the yearning to build a more comprehensive framework for understanding the interrelationships of life on Earth. The marine lineages we work on tend to be drop-dead gorgeous and reflect spectacular morphological diversity, such as meiofaunal animals, euglenozoans, dinoflagellates, cercozoans & marine gregarine apicomplexans.

 

Al Lewis

Professor Emeritus
Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences
Website
Email

Dr. Lewis is interested in understanding the interactions between oceans and plankton, especially how initial dispersal and survival, water properties, food conditions and predator numbers influence zooplankton. Lewis is especially interested in the functional morphology of copepods. These characteristics, when combined with distribution patterns, provide information on the dynamics of copepod populations and their role in food webs.

 

Sandra Lindstrom

Adjunct Professor
Botany
Website
Email

The north-east Pacific coast exhibits an extraordinarily diverse marine benthic seaweed flora. Molecular tools have allowed the Lindstrom lab to address questions of species limits and relationships and the biogeography of speciation in this environment. Novel findings allowed for certain species identifications, hypothesis on the existence of refugia within the glacial boundary, and to identify geographic boundaries’ role in speciation.

 

Patrick Martone

Associate Professor
Botany
Departmental Website, Laboratory Website, and Publications
Email

The intertidal zone of wave-swept rocky shores is one of the most physically stressful habitats on Earth. The Martone lab is interested in intertidal seaweeds, which must survive these conditions wherever they settle and grow. Specific foci of research are the selective pressures driving diversity, convergent evolution, evolution of lignified cell walls, biomaterials and cell wall mechanics, algal physiology and climate change, and costs and benefits of epiphytism.

 

Charles Menzies

Professor
Anthropology
Website and Publications
Email

Hagwil hayetsk (Charles Menzies), member of Gitxaała Nation, conducts research and teaching on the ethnography of Western Europe and Coastal British Columbia, natural resource-dependent communities and resource management policies, and the political economy of social struggle. His book, “People of the Saltwater: An Ethnography of Git lax m’oon” discusses an economy based on natural-resource extraction by examining fisheries and their central importance to the Gitxaalas’ cultural roots. He is also the Director of The Ethnographic Film Unit at UBC https://anthfilm.anth.ubc.ca/

 

Mary O’Connor

Associate Professor
Zoology
Departmental Website, Laboratory Website, and Publications
Email

The O’Conner lab studies how the abiotic environment influences marine ecological communities. In particular, they want to understand what drives variation in ecosystem structure and function to better understand the ecological impacts of climate change and habitat modification and to explore how conservation efforts can be most effective given natural environmental changes.

 

Laura Wegener Parfrey

Assistant Professor
Botany
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The Parfrey lab studies communities of microbial eukaryotes with the goal of understanding their diversity and distribution across environments. They use high-throughput sequencing to characterize microbial communities within the phylogenetic framework of the eukaryotic tree of life. Currently, research focuses on eukaryotes in the human microbiome and microbial eukaryotic communities across environmental gradients.

 

Daniel Pauly

Professor
Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries; Zoology
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Dr. Pauly’s research interests include aquatic ecosystems, Ichthyology and Fisheries management. He is also devoted to studying, documenting and promoting policies to mitigate the impact of fisheries on the world’s marine ecosystems. Pauly is also co-founder of FishBase.org, the online encyclopedia of more than 30,000 fish species, and he has helped develop the widely-used Ecopath modeling software.

 

John Richardson

Professor
Forest and Conservation Sciences
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The Richardson lab is interested in the ecological processes that limit populations and contribute to the assembly of communities, and how land use impacts those processes. They use experimental manipulations of small streams and riparian areas and have manipulated inputs, species composition, abiotic factors, physical structure, etc., to test how these processes contribute to biodiversity and ecosystem function.

 

Patricia Schulte

Professor
Zoology
Departmental Website, Laboratory Website, and Publications
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The Schulte lab is interested in studying the physiological adaptations that allow animals to live in particular environments. They take advantage of intraspecific variation in fish to study the evolution of the mechanisms that allow animals to respond to a changing environment. Specific research projects focus on thermal adaptation in killifish, conservation genomics of Atlantic salmon, and the evolution of exercise performance in three-spine stickleback.

 

Curtis Suttle

Professor
Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences; Botany; Microbiology and Immunology
Website and Publications
Email

The Suttle lab explores the diversity, function, and impact of viruses and microorganisms on mortality, community structure and nutrient and energy cycling in aquatic systems. Methods range from isolation and characterization of novel isolates to metagenomic analysis of whole systems.

 

Eric Taylor

Professor
Zoology
Website and Publications
Email

The Taylor lab researches patterns of genetic variation within and between natural populations, the processes that promote and organize such variation, and their relevance to the origins and conservation of biodiversity. In particular, they are interested in population structure and the processes that influence population structure, speciation and hybridization, and the implications of these processes for conservation.

 

Andrew Trites

Professor
Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences
Departmental Website, Research Unit Website, and Publications
Email

Trites’ research is primarily focused on pinnipeds (Steller sea lions, northern fur seals, and harbor seals) and involves captive studies, field studies and simulation models that range from single species to whole ecosystems. The research program is designed to further the conservation and understanding of marine mammals, and resolve conflicts between people and marine mammals.