(He/Him)
🎙 Tell us about yourself?
I am a third-year Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Dr. Scott MacIvor. I have developed a deep interest in how humans, plants, and wildlife interact with each other in cities. This journey started with collecting biodiversity monitoring data at the Rouge Urban National Park as a conservation technician in the Cadotte lab. For my Master's research, I studied how humans can engineer green roof ecosystems to provide ecosystem services (eg, habitat provisioning, and stormwater performance) in the Lundholm lab at Saint Mary’s University (Halifax, Canada). Building upon my previous experiences, I began my Ph.D. to explore how practitioners can proactively design green spaces to prevent plant invasions, in collaboration with local conservation authorities (themeadoway.ca) and an international network of scientists. Outside of academia, I really enjoy playing jazz piano.
🎙 What are your research interests & what are you currently researching?
The general theme of my research is to examine how people can design green spaces to support and sustain biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Currently, I am broadly interested in the susceptibility of urban green spaces to plant invasions, a group of organisms that can degrade biodiversity and ecosystem services. In collaboration with the Global Urban Invasions Consortium, I have created a framework to see how the likelihood of being invaded ('invasibility') is related to three drivers in urban green spaces: the potential pressure that is exerted by an invasive plant, environmental conditions, and biotic interactions.
This framework is useful for practitioners because it allows them to find the pick and choose appropriate variables, and then find the most influential driver, which depends on the characteristics of the urban green space (eg., public access, intended functions, ecological features).
🎙 What is the significance of your current research?
I am applying this framework of ‘invasibility’ to figure out how susceptible meadows are to a pervasive invasive plant (dog-strangling vine: Vincetoxicum rossicum) that is difficult to eradicate. This is done within the ‘Meadoway’, a 16-km stretch of green spaces underneath hydro corridors where the Toronto Regional Conservation Authority (TRCA) is undergoing native plant restoration.
Restored urban meadows provide benefits to city residents, such providing habitats for pollinators and birds, which is why the TRCA is also managing invasive plants that could negatively impact these services.
In the ‘Meadoway’, management regimes (e.g., tilling), curation of native seed mixes, and unmanaged patches of dog-strangling vine are possible drivers of invasibility. Finding and quantifying the most influential driver would support on-the-ground knowledge from practitioners and allow future collaborations for developing proactive and cost-effective management strategies.
🎙 Any interesting insights/results so far related to your research?
Current findings show that the practice of frequent tilling over many years and a high number of seeds in the soil reduces invasibility by 15% each, respectively. This makes sense because frequent tilling should deplete the seed bank of invasive plants in previous years, and then allow other plant species to germinate (especially in high numbers) and occupy space. The outcome is fewer opportunities for the dog-strangling vine to colonize and establish in the meadows.
Overall, my research shows that invasibility is lowered with active management strategies and native seed mixes. A proactive strategy is to modify existing mixes before restoration, by using cost-effective native plants that grow quickly and produce many seeds to reduce the germination of invasive species. These findings demonstrate the flexibility of this framework to different scenarios with clear actionable outcomes and can be applied to other UGS with different properties that affect its susceptibility to plant invasions.
🎙 What aspirations do you have for your research? How do you see it being utilized?
For future projects, I plan to present a workshop for practitioners to use a novel and relevant metric of invasibility in their toolkits so that they can apply it to their existing datasets. This includes a proposal to extend the first field study with drone imagery to quantify plant identification (eg, dominant native plants, dog-strangling vine) to help detect landscape-level patterns of invasibility across the entire 16-km stretch of ‘the Meadoway’.