McGill University
Ph.D. candidate
Supervisor: Irene Gregory-Eaves
Beatrix Beisner
Zofia E. Taranu, ECCC
Start: 2022-09-01

Project

Long-term ecological network dynamics: insights from paleolimnology
The goal of my research is to advance our understanding of community dynamics over the past ~200 years and employ a network lens on paleolimnological records from Canadian lakes; where the biological, chemical, and physical proxies preserved in lake sediments are used to infer past environmental conditions of aquatic ecosystems. Specifically, I will use zooplankton, a trophic group that plays a key role in lakes both as grazers and prey for higher consumers, as indicators of past communities and to evaluate dynamics over time. I will leverage existing datasets collected by the NSERC LakePulse Network, which uniformly sampled 664 lakes across Canada, of which they collected 115 sediment cores, across 12 ecozones during the summers of 2017-2019. My objectives include: (1) quantifying how networks of zooplankton assemblages (subfossilized cladoceran remains) change over broad spatial-temporal scales using a top-bottom approach, (2) examining whether the network structure of ecosystems that experienced a critical transition (loss in stability) was altered and how, (3) determining what new insights are gained from incorporating both environmental variables and multiple trophic groups (diatoms, cladocerans, and chironomids) into networks, and finally, (4) comparing the network structure of zooplankton communities derived from different data streams (i.e., sedimentary DNA (sedDNA) versus cladocerans subfossils) to understand how data collection methods affect network construction.

Publications

1- Influence of reproductive state and temperature on the functional response of the marbled crayfish, Procambarus virginalis
Sheppard, Noemie L. M., Jennifer Pham, Anthony Ricciardi
2023 Biological Invasions

2- Long-term environmental changes in the Canadian boreal zone: Synthesizing temporal trends from lake sediment archives to inform future sustainability
Gros, Michelle, David R. Zilkey, Katherine T. Griffiths, Jennifer Pham, Paul W. MacKeigan, Zofia E. Taranu, Candice Aulard, Alexandre Baud, Rebecca E. Garner, Hamid Ghanbari, Maude Lachapelle, Marie-Ève Monchamp, Cindy Paquette, Dermot Antoniades, Pierre Francus, John P. Smol, Irene Gregory-Eaves
2023 Environmental Reviews