Instructors

Group leaders / Instructors

Raquel ALFARO SÁNCHEZ, Wilfrid Laurier University

Raquel is a forest ecologist interested in how forest ecosystems, from Mediterranean, tropical and boreal regions, respond to the unprecedented increase in frequency and intensity of wildfires and climate extremes. Much of her research is focused on the use of tree-ring records to understand the response of growth, climate sensitivity and functional traits of trees to climate change hazards to ultimately provide direct management implications for both, risk mitigation and post-hazard recovery

Valentina BUTTÒ, UQAC

Valentina Buttò is postdoctoral researcher at UQO (Université du Québec en Outaouais) and UQAC (Université du Québec à Chicoutimi). Valentina strives to understand the ecophysiological mechanisms underlying plants growth and their relationship with environmental changes. Her work focuses specifically on the endogenous and exogenous drivers of tree-growth in temperate and boreal forests at both single-tree and stand levels.

Valentina received a master degree in Forestry and Environmental Sciences from Universitá di Padova (Padova, Italy) and a PhD in Environmental Sciences from Université du Québec à Chicoutimi (Québec, Canada). Since her undergraduate studies, Valentina works with wood anatomy at inter-annual and intra-annual scales. During her PhD project, Valentina acquired a deep knowledge of bud, xylem phenolology, and non-structural sugars dynamics, investigating the relationship between primary and secondary growth.

Adam CSANK, University of Nevada

Dr. Adam Csank is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Nevada, Reno. Adam originally is from Nova Scotia, Canada and became interested in paleoclimatology and tree-ring science as an undergraduate at Dalhousie University where he did an undergraduate honours thesis project looking at Cretaceous fossil wood. Adam then went on to do graduate work at the University of Saskatchewan and later a PhD at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona. Working to use sub-fossil Pliocene wood from the Arctic to reconstruct climate.

Adam’s current research focuses on stable isotope dendrochronology and how isotopic techniques can be used to supplement traditional dendrochronology. He has worked on multiple different projects that can be divided into four general themes. 1) Arctic climates and ecosystems: in the Arctic he is working to understand the Paleoclimatology and paleoecology of Miocene-Pliocene aged fossil forests and to understand modern day plant-climate responses. 2) Reconstructing climates using stable isotopes from trees. 3) Tree and ecosystem responses to disturbance, including insect outbreaks, drought and fire. 4) Human-environment interactions: Adam is working with historical geographers, archeologists and historians to investigate historic patterns of timber trade, to investigate exploitation of indigenous natural resources and lands by settlers, to look at historic land use changes, and to understand historic patterns of mercury pollution.

Andria DAWSON, Mount Royal University

Andria Dawson is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Mount Royal University. She obtained both her MSc and PhD in Mathematics at University of Alberta, before joining the Paleo-Ecological Observatory Network where she completed her postdoctoral fellowship.


Her research interests are in addressing questions about ecology and Earth system change across a range of spatio-temporal scales. Her work is data driven; she uses quantitative models informed by data to make inference about past, present, and future ecosystems and climates. This inference is typically done within a Bayesian framework, with the objective of characterising both data and process uncertainty.

Andria’s current research uses paleoecological data (tree-rings and fossil pollen), as well as other data types (genetic, trait, climate, and remote sensing), to address questions about ecosystems, their biophysical and biogeochemical properties, and climate. She works with climate and ecosystem modellers to assimilate empirical reconstructions to constrain ecological forecasts.


Her favourite quote is by The Atlantic science writer Ross Andersen: To know the Earth’s future, you must first know its past.

Fabio GENNARETTI, UQAT

Fabio Gennaretti is assistant professor of forest science at UQAT. He studies the influence of natural and anthropogenic disturbances and climate change on past, present, and future forest ecosystems functioning. His research is at the interface between three disciplines: forest ecophysiology, mechanistic modeling, and dendroclimatology. At the stand scale, he studies carbon and water fluxes, and other biogeochemical cycles in forests. At the landscape level, he analyzes plant succession and ecosystem transformations, especially following fires.

He also conducts research on the climate variability at regional scale and its forcings (especially volcanism) by producing climatic reconstructions using biological archives (tree-rings from subfossil wood) and climate scenarios through the post-processing of regional and global model simulations. In recent years, he has acquired skills in ecophysiological modeling of forest ecosystems and in joint analyses of multiple tree-ring traits including their width, anatomy, density and stable isotopes.


Research themes:

  • Carbon and water fluxes

  • Stable isotopes

  • Ecological successions

  • Climate variability and its forcing

  • Dendroclimatic reconstructions

  • Climate scenarios

  • Forest ecophysiological modelling

  • Tree-ring multiple traits

Karen HEETER, University of Idaho

Karen Heeter is an avid botanist and a research assistant in the Department of Earth and Spatial Sciences at the University of Idaho. She earned her BS in Ethnobotany and her MS is Applied Ecology & Conservation Biology from Frostburg State University, and she recently earned her PhD in Geography from the University of Idaho in May 2022. Karen's research interests focus on Quaternary landscape dynamics and paleoenvironmental reconstruction from intra-annual to multi-century time scales. She uses dendrochronology and spatial analysis as research tools to investigate landscape‐scale dynamics and to integrate present‐day climatic and ecological processes with those that functioned in the past and those that are likely to become altered in the near‐future.

During her dissertation, Karen's research focused on the refinement and application of blue intensity methods to develop a highly collaborative, tree-ring based, paleotemperature proxy network, which provides coverage for much North America. Karen will be joining the Tree Ring Lab at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory as a postdoctoral researcher in Fall 2022.

Margot KAYE, Penn State University

Margot Kaye is a Professor of Forest Ecology in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management at the Penn State University. She is a forest ecologist who uses tree rings to reconstruct forest disturbance, forest history, and species interactions. Her research has recently focused on the effects of global change on eastern deciduous forests, however she has on going research in the western US and western Mediterranean.

She first participated in NADEF in 1993 as an undergraduate student, and since has instructed at over 10 fieldweeks in North America and one in Europe. She looks forward to working in the northern forest ecosystems of Quebec for NADEF 2022.

Miguel MONTORO GIRONA, UQAT

Miguel Montoro Girona is professor in forest ecology at UQAT (Canada). His research aims to evaluate the impact of natural (insect outbreak, fire, moose, beaver, windthrow) and anthropogenic disturbances (log drive and silvicultural practices) on forest ecosystem at multiples spatio-temporal scales to provide tools for the implementation of forest sustainable management in the face of climate change. He uses paleoecological and dendroecological approaches to reconstruct past disturbance regimes, or landscape simulations to predict the future of forest ecosystems.

Recently, he funded a research Group – GREMA to help the regional institutions to apply sustainable forestry and to adapt forest management strategies to climate change.

Keywords:

  • Silviculture

  • Restoration Ecology

  • Biodiversity

  • Disturbance Ecology

  • Tree-ring multiple traits

  • Landscape modelling

  • Paleoecology

Jim SPEER, Indiana State University

Dr. James H. Speer is a Professor of Geography and Geology at Indiana State University. He received his bachelors and master’s degree from the University of Arizona in Geosciences and his PhD from the University of Tennessee in Geography. He is a biogeographer who uses tree-rings to reconstruct environmental variables such as climate change, fire history, and insect outbreaks. He has collected tree-ring samples from around the world, especially in the United States.

Through his years of studying environmental history, he has realized that humans are operating outside of the natural range of variability for most natural systems, which has motivated him to give back to society by being a champion for sustainability at Indiana State University and in the Wabash Valley. He has written multiple books including a textbook on dendro-chronology call the "Fundamentals of Tree-Ring Research". More recently, he published popular action adventure novels that teach science through an adventure story in Exposé on Climate Change and Exposé on Sustainability.

Invited speakers

Etienne BOUCHER

UQAM

Jill E. HARVEY

Thompson Rivers University

Christoforos PAPPAS

UQAM and Téluq

Trevor PORTER

University of Toronto

Picture credits: Jim Speer