PhD Candidate in Oceanography
Université Laval, Quebec City, Québec, Canada
Supervisor: Dr. Ladd Johnson

As they say, spatiotemporal heterogeneity is the spice of life!  I love “the weird and wonderful, the beautiful and the bizarre”. Check out my Research Page for information about my interests, which span community ecology and biodiversity of marine invertebrates, from genes to continents, and uses advanced biogeographical, statistical, and molecular tools.  Currently, my PhD dissertation involves a dynamic, policy-driven foray into marine biodiversity and non-indigenous species (NIS) with the following themes :
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1)  Impacts of Marine NIS
Invasive species are infamously known as “the great homogenizers” by out-competing, over-growing, or otherwise excluding other species in their introduced range.  Heather is measuring the contributions of NIS--both as individual species and as a group--to local diversity and spatial heterogeneity at introduction sites in Atlantic and Pacific Canada.

2)  Regional Biodiversity Footprint of a Marina
Ports and marinas are hot-spots for NIS introductions, but they provide starkly different physical and biological conditions than surrounding shorelines. What NIS species are likely to remain inside introduction sites and which ones disperse or “spill” out? Those that escape do so at different rates based on their larval traits and environmental matching.  Using recruitment patterns and distributions of established species in a marina and along surrounding coastlines, Heather is creating a framework for assessing a marina’s unique footprint on local and regional biodiversity in British Columbia.

3)  Sea Stars Can’t Jump!  (i.e., Effects of Mesopredators)
One of the factors that determine the resilience of a marine ecosystem against biological invasions is the ability of local predators to consume or otherwise exclude NIS. However, sea stars, which are some the most powerful mesopredators in Pacific Canada, have declined in recent years due to a wasting disease. These mesopredators, along with crabs and sea urchins, play a key role in consuming certain species, including some that have been introduced. Heather is exploring the community ecology of crawling mesopredators by pairing a survey of biofouling assemblages on artificial structures where mesopredators have or don’t have access (i.e., docks and pilings) with a field experiment that allows or excludes mesopredators.

4)  Species Detection Bias (i.e., How to avoid sampling everything, everywhere, all the time)
Heather worked in collaboration with Fisheries and Oceans Canada in Nova Scotia, Ontario, and British Columbia to model the efficiency of different field collection methods for early detection of the great variety of marine and freshwater NIS across Canada. She is creating a decision framework for incorporating multiple field methods that maximize the detection-per-effort of NIS and other rare benthic invertebrates.

Candidate au doctorat en océanographie
Université Laval, Quebec City, Québec, Canada
Directeur: Dr. Ladd Johnson

Heather étudie l'écologie et la diversité des communautés d’invertébrés. Sa carrière de recherche l'a amenée à travailler sur les milieux marins d’Amérique du Nord et centrale et en Australasie.  Elle s'intéresse à l'application des techniques innovantes pour découvrir les causes et les conséquences de la biodiversité sur une échelle locale, régionale et mondiale.  Dans son travail de doctorat, Heather vise à utiliser des traits d'espèces, la probabilité de détection, et les biais méthodologiques pour déterminer la combinaison d’effort nécessaire par différentes techniques d'échantillonnage afin de détecter des espèces rares (ex, la détection précoce des espèces envahissantes) dans les ports marins et d'eaux douces de Nouvelle-Écosse, d’Ontario et de Colombie-Britannique.  Elle utilise aussi les structures artificielles des ports marins pour établir l'importance de l'accès aux prédateurs benthiques dans la formation des assemblages et aussi pour définir les échelles spatiales pertinentes de la biodiversité dans les communautés « biofouling ».