Presented by the Foundation Cowboys Fringants, the new Demain la forêt Program, which will be expanded across Quebec, was officially launched this April in the presence of its three long-standing partners, le Jour de la Terre, the David Suzuki Foundation and La Tribu. This major program will have the main objectives of planting resilient forests, educating and mobilizing the general public, supporting research and identifying innovative practices in terms of reforestation, conferring the efforts of all stakeholders and to make these actions shine through the arts.

Shown in photo: Mme Suzanne Verreault, élue responsable de l'environnement, Ville de Québec M. Jérôme Dupras, Professeur UQO, Président de la Fondation Cowboys Fringants M. Karel Mayrand, directeur, Fondation David Suzuki M. Michel St-Germain, Viridis Environnement Mme Marie-Annick Lépine, membre des Cowboys Fringants M. Jean-François Pauzé, membre des Cowboys Fringants M. Martin Bureau, Artiste peintre M. Karl Tremblay, membre des Cowboys Fringants Mme Sophie Lavallée, Professeure Université Laval Mme Julie Lafortune, directrice exécutive, Jour de la Terre M. Renaud Lapierre, Viridis Environnement M. Régis Labaume, Maire, Ville de Québec Click here for more info.

On May 10th and 11th, the second QCBS R symposium was held at the Biological Station of the Laurentians. These two days were an opportunity for the 33 students to share their knowledge of biodiversity analysis in R, through 5 different workshops. This conference was a success and we are already looking forward to organizing next year! All workshop materials are available on the symposium wiki page. Click here for more info.

A new paper from Fanie Pelletier laboratory, published at the end of March in Nature Communication, has received an incredible media attention. Only a week after its release, it shows an Altmetric Attention Score of more than 1250 points, reaching the top 5% of scores obtained to date and the 99e percentile for papers of the same age. These works have received to date a media coverage more than 150 times worldwide, and this number is still increasing. The article, Hunting regulation favors slow life histories in a large carnivore, reports the works of the doctorate student Joanie Van de Walle, and shows the indirect effects of hunting on selection and demographic processes. These works were done on a brow bear population in Sweden, where the regulation protects females with cubs from hunting. Females can keep their young for 1.5 or 2.5 years, thus favoring the survival of females that keep their young for longer periods, and their young too. The loss of reproductive opportunity for females that keep their cubs for longer periods is compensated by a gain in survival, particularly when hunting pressure is high. Click here for more info.

During the opening of the new multifunctional room of the Institut de Recherche en Biologie Végétale (IRBV), Professor Luc Brouillet presented the long history of this collaboration between the city of Montreal and the Université de Montréal. In 1920, Brother Marie-Victorin created the Institut Botanique of the Université de Montréal, rebranded IRBV during its move to the Montreal Botanical Garden in 1939. The institute currently hosts more than 200 researchers, students and support staff, including 11 members of the QCBS. Inaugurated in 2011, the Biodiversity Centre houses the major Quebec collections of plants, insects and fungi, in addition to developing innovative research and raising public awareness of biodiversity conservation. Click here for more info.

The loss of biodiversity (animals and plants species) will continue unabated with increasing risk of dramatic shifts in ecosystems functioning and human well-being. This environmental issue is of special concern and should therefore reach the public. We wanted to compare media coverage of biodiversity with climate change, another major environmental issue. Our study, jointly conducted by researchers from Université du Québec à Rimouski, Laval University and Sherbrooke University in press in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution compared scientific literature and press articles addressing climate change and biodiversity between 1991 and 2016. Time series analyses revealed that media coverage of climate change was up to eight times higher compared to biodiversity. Such discrepancy could not be explained by different scientific productivity or research funding between the two issues. The study finally discussed several initiatives that scientists could undertake to better communicate major discoveries to the public and policy makers. A greater public awareness regarding this issue would help implementing new policies to mitigate the impacts of biodiversity loss. Click here for more info.

Potential causes of the current native pollinator decline observed around the world include pesticide uses, lost of floral diversity and landscape simplification. In apple production, apple trees blossom soon in spring, too early for many native pollinator species, and orchards often represent undiversified floral landscapes, two characteristics limiting their attractiveness for pollinators. Actually, much of the pollination is done by the use of the honey bee (Apis mellifera). But this work could be done by native pollinators such as bumblebees Bombus spp., more efficient than honey bees, and already working early in spring, but generally rare in orchards because of the reduced floral diversity. This three-year-project, in collaboration with apple producers from Montérégie and Estrie, was settled last spring by Amélie Gervais, a PhD student co-supervised by Valérie Fournier and Marc Bélisle. This study will quantify the impacts of flower planting - such as windbreaks, riparian strips and flowerbeds - on the diversity of native bumblebees and on their winter survival. Ultimately, this project will evaluate the biological and economic impacts of habitat enhancements to support pollinators in apple production.

Soil is a complex system comprised of a large number of belowground interactions between the living and non-living elements. Among these interactions, many plants and fungi have developed a close relationship that can be beneficial to both partners. The aim of this project is therefore to better understand the interactions between plants and their fungal partners in sugar maple ecosystems found in southern Quebec. Subsequently, a field experiment will allow us to highlight the effect of plants-fungi associations on organic matter decomposition. Finally, in the context of climate change, we will attempt to determine the extent to which the expected migration of trees such as maple from temperate to boreal forests will be impacted by microbes in boreal soils. As a whole, this project aims to improve our understanding of the role of underground interactions in the functioning of ecosystems.

Protected areas such as national or provincial parks help to conserve ecosystems and their biodiversity. However, few studies have evaluated the effect of land conservation in the private sector in maintaining ecosystems and biodiversity. In recent years, the Réseau de Milieux Naturels Protégés (www.RMNnat.org) has developed a unique, yet still underexploited database, georeferencing most of the protected areas on private lands in Quebec. For its part, the Canadensys network has a large open database of species occurrence, and the Quebec Natural Heritage Data Center (CDPNQ) can provide data on endangered, vulnerable or potentially designated species. By coupling data on Quebec flora from Canadensys and the CDPNQ to data on protected areas from the RMN, we wish to test the effect of private land conservation on several components of biodiversity (eg, alpha and beta biodiversity) through spatial and statistical analyzes.

Northern communities face many challenges associated with climate change. Animal species, their abundance and timing of emergence/arrival are also changing rapidly. The Northern Biodiversity Project is dedicated to documenting how climate change may impact the animal (and plant) communities of the tundra by inviting Northern citizens to monitor the presence of species they observe on an adapted and flexible online platform resulting from a partnership between the QCBS and the CEN. http://northernbiodiversity.ca Click here for more info.