Shared infrastructures

Biodiversité Québec Atlas

Database containing over 24 million biodiversity observations and that integrates open sourced data (e.g. GBIF, eBird, eButterfly), government data, and research data.

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See the full list of shared infrastructures.

Excellence awards

Biodiversity Science Discovery awards (BSDA)

This year’s award Recipients

Maïka Martin

Antoine Larocque

Corinne Lapierre

See more details here!

Research funding

Knowledge to Action Research Groups

See the full list of our Knowledge Hubs and Knowledge to Action research groups.

Workshop

The workshop on Circular Economy and Biodiversity is presented in partnership with the The Québec Circular Economy Research Network (RRECQ). It will combine panel presentations from experts in the field and World Café discussions to identify potential synergies between networks, to unravel how biodiversity plays a key role in a circular economy model, and how a more circular economy can foster biodiversity conversation.

Keynote Speaker

Laura Pollock, McGill University

The 2024 edition (BIO860M) was held at the Gault Nature reserve, Mont St.Hilaire, under the supervision of Steven Kembel (UQAM), from November 11-22, 2024.

This course targeted science professionals at a high level (particularly graduate students and post-docs) and focused on scientific aspects of biodiversity science.

This year marked the 10-year anniversary of  R workshops. Over 800 participants have attended this series of 10 workshops, which highlights the great success this training program has had over the years.

This year, over 300 students had the chance to participate in this workshop.

Research professional’s workshops

QCBS research professionals continuously offer workshops for both QCBS members and non-members alike!

Intensive courses offered this past year

• Summer School in Path analysis in ecology, offered by Université de Sherbrooke
• Biodiversity Modelling Summer School, offered by Université de Sherbrooke
• Summer School in Advanced Statistics for the Life Sciences, offered by Université de Sherbrooke

The QCBS represents a partnership between 13 universities and many collaborating organizations. The following represent only a handful of the great projects and organizations that share the QCBS’ goals and values.

IPBES

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is an independent intergovernmental body established by states to strengthen the science-policy interface for biodiversity and ecosystem services for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, long-term human well-being and sustainable development. 

In decision IPBES-10/1, the Plenary approved a methodological assessment on monitoring biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people. Following a call for expressions of interest, McGill University made an offer to host the technical support unit for the assessment, which was accepted by the Bureau on 22 November 2023. Thus, the QCBS has forged strong and highly productive collaborations with IPBES throughout the years.

Blitz the Gap

Québec is vast and undersampled, with over 90% of the land area without any occurrence records of any taxa, and citizen science offers the only viable pathway to filling these gaps quickly. The QCBS is well-positioned to help fill this gap, because it is a network of universities and researchers who live, work, and study in many places in Québec. The “Blitz the Gap” project aims to leverage the QCBS’s broad network to fill biodiversity data gaps. The main funding component are Champion Grants, which are offered to QCBS graduate student and postdoc members to plan a bioblitz with a local community, a park, a library or school, or to support sampling events for themselves and their lab group. 

QCBS members have published many papers in the last year, and they were featured in over 20 different journals! The following table lists the journals in which our members have published their work.

QCBS members’ work also appeared in highly prestigious journals over the past year, as detailed by the following figure.

Over the past year, the QCBS has gained close to 1,300 new followers on social media, which represents a overall 37.5% increase when compared to last year’s numbers.

The social media platform that saw the biggest growth is LinkedIn, as it gained over 800 new followers. As of the start of 2025, we are reaching close to 3,500 people with the QCBS’ social media presence. The exact numbers are broken down in the graph below.

Over the last year, the QCBS website has been visited by over 42,000 users from all over the world, which averages to about 121 users per day. The map below shows from where our users have viewed our website.