Current Lab Members
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Morgan A. Crowley
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PhD Candidate (Department of Natural Resource Sciences)
Research Interests: fire mapping, disturbance detection, Remote sensing, multi-source data synthesis, Landsat, Sentinel-2, MODIS, Google Earth Engine, Bayesian Updating of Land Cover algorithm Extreme fire seasons are becoming increasingly common across Canada, and annual burned area is predicted to escalate. Widespread and large fires impact ecosystem services such as timber supply, wildlife habitat, and carbon storage, and diminished air quality has a detrimental effect on human health and well-being. Accurate maps of active fire progression can help stakeholders fight fires, better understand how they burn, and model future landscape disturbance and subsequent impacts on ecosystem services. The primary objective of my thesis is to develop data fusion methods to produce and analyse decades of fire progressions at the provincial level. By using novel classification and data-fusion methods to refine burned-area mapping, this dataset and subsequent analyses hope to offer insights to the fields of fire ecology and disturbance monitoring. ResearchGate OrcID Google Scholar
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Xavier Giroux-Bougard
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PhD Candidate (Department of Natural Resource Sciences)
Research Interests: Landscape genetics, landscape ecology, functional connectivity, spatial ecology As the configuration and spatial structure of landscapes change, conservation biology and wildlife management are ever more concerned with the degree of flow and movement of individuals within and between wildlife populations, defined as functional connectivity. Understanding how species use habitat to disperse and migrate is critical in assessing the long-term viability of their populations as well as developing improved tools to identify areas which significantly contribute to the connectivity of the landscape. My research focuses on optimizing models of landscape connectivity using population genetic data as a proxy for long term wildlife movements at large scales. Specifically, I am interested in: (1) understanding how individual species respond to large disturbances in a landscape (forestry, forest fires, etc...), (2) understanding how much time it takes to restore the functional connectivity of a disturbed landscape, and (3) developing new tools to build landscape connectivity models which optimize the functional connectivity of multiple species. |
