Functional responses of understory plants to natural disturbance-based management in eastern and western Canada.

Natural disturbance-based management (NDBM) is hypothesized to maintain managed forest ecosystem integrity by reducing differences between natural and managed forests. The effectiveness of this approach often entails local comparisons of species composition or diversity for a variety of biota from managed and unmanaged forests. Understory vegetation is regularly the focus of such comparison because of its importance in nutrient cycling, forest regeneration, and for wildlife.

How will climate change and forest harvesting influence the habitat quality of two culturally salient species?

Boreal landscapes face increasing disturbances which can affect cultural keystone species, i.e. culturally salient species that shape in a major way the cultural identity of a people.

Out of site, out of mind: Changes in feather moss phyllosphere microbiota in mine offsite boreal landscapes.

Plant-microbe interactions play a crucial role in maintaining biodiversity and ecological services in boreal forest biomes. Mining for minerals, and especially the emission of heavy metal-enriched dust from mine sites, is a potential threat to biodiversity in offsite landscapes. Understanding the impacts of mining on surrounding phyllosphere microbiota is especially lacking.

Dominance of coniferous and broadleaved trees drives bacterial associations with boreal feather mosses.

The composition of ecologically important moss-associated bacterial communities seems to be mainly driven by host species but may also be shaped by environmental conditions related with tree dominance. The moss phyllosphere has been studied in coniferous forests while broadleaf forests remain understudied. To determine if host species or environmental conditions defined by tree dominance drives the bacterial diversity in the moss phyllosphere, we used 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing to quantify changes in bacterial communities as a function of host species (Pleurozium schreberi and Ptilium crista-castrensis) and forest type (coniferous black spruce versus deciduous broadleaf trembling aspen) in eastern Canada.

Small but visible: Predicting rare bryophyte distribution and richness patterns using remote sensing-based ensembles of small models.

In Canadian boreal forests, bryophytes represent an essential component of biodiversity and play a significant role in ecosystem functioning. Despite their ecological importance and sensitivity to disturbances, bryophytes are overlooked in conservation strategies due to knowledge gaps on their distribution, which is known as the Wallacean shortfall. Rare species deserve priority attention in conservation as they are at a high risk of extinction.

Trends and gaps in the use of citizen science derived data as input for species distribution models: A quantitative review.

Citizen science (CS) currently refers to the participation of non-scientist volunteers in any discipline of conventional scientific research. Over the last two decades, nature-based CS has flourished due to innovative technology, novel devices, and widespread digital platforms used to collect and classify species occurrence data. For scientists, CS offers a low-cost approach of collecting species occurrence information at large spatial scales that otherwise would be prohibitively expensive.

Stochastic processes dominate during boreal bryophyte community assembly.

Why are plant species found in certain locations and not in others? The study of community assembly rules has attempted to answer this question, and many studies articulate the historic dichotomy of deterministic (predictable niches) vs. stochastic (random or semi-random processes). The study of successional sequences to determine whether they converge, as would be expected by deterministic theory, or diverge, as stochastic theory would suggest, has been one method used to investigate this question.