Behnaz Bahroudi

Behnaz is working on the reclamation of tailing storage facilities (TSF). The primary goal of her research is to ensure the return of a sustainable ecosystem to former degraded land through determining the appropriate depths of cover. One way to reach this goal is through studying the impact of water infiltration rates on the growth of local plant species in the tailings through different cover depths. Behnaz is also researching the influence of different types of amendments, topsoil and subsoil ratios on vegetation growth to determine the most effective treatment for reclamation of TSFs. Through this research, she will evaluate the influence of different amendment types and ratios on metal uptake by examining sequestration of metals in the plant tissue and collecting the leachates to analyze for heavy metals. This research has three components: a field lysimeter trial of water infiltration in mine tailings, a field soil amendment, and a greenhouse trial to address the mentioned objectives. Behnaz’s research will help determine the best suitable treatment to return a sustainable native ecosystem to TSFs, especially for copper and gold mines.

Keenan Baker

Keenan is a research associate and lab manager at Fraser Lab, having recently graduated from the Bachelor of Natural Resource Science program at TRU. He is passionate about ecosystem reclamation and completed undergraduate research on the effects of simulated grazing on fire treated mine tailings to help transition agronomic species’ dominated grasslands to a more natural state.

Kate Bezooyen

Kate holds a bachelor’s degree in Natural Resource Science from Thompson Rivers University. The program left her with a solid foundation of ecological knowledge which she continued to build through past work experience across western Canada. Kate has worked on a variety of projects, some of which include: wildlife research, environmental conservation, and land reclamation. Her interest in wildfire management was first piqued after a summer job with Alberta Wildfire in 2016 and seeing the impacts of the Horse River Fire. She spent the next few years working on an initial attack wildfire crew and researching fire behavior and fire ecology before returning home to Kamloops in 2020 to take the position of Wildfire Management Specialist with Forsite Consultants Ltd.

Kate is studying changes in hourly weather across British Columbia to provide insights into how the wildfire environment is changing at the scale of a daily operational period. She is particularly interested in how changing conditions overnight and during peak burn are influencing fire behaviour, and how that may differ spatially across the province.

Tanya Brouwers

As climate change drives agriculture further north into areas previously unsuitable for farming, it becomes critical to understand the environmental impacts, like carbon emissions resulting from land conversion. The goal of Tanya’s thesis is to understand how different agricultural management practices influence a soil’s capacity for carbon sequestration. To achieve this, Tanya will use several soil health indicators to analyze carbon changes in soils converted from forests used for cattle grazing to cropped systems for cattle grazing. The test site for this project is one of the BC Living Labs and is a collaboration between TRU, Devick Ranch, BC Forage Council and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada to “help farmers mitigate climate change while improving the productivity and ecological benefits of farmland for future generations”.

Courtenay Campbell

Courtenay is a proud member of the Tk'emlúps te Secwe̓pemc Band located in Kamloops, British Columbia. She has always been interested in plants and understanding how a forest operates. Learning how everything is connected, even the intricate details in a forest system, intrigues her every day. Additionally, learning ways to sustainably manage forest ecosystems to strive for healthy beautiful forests that we can continue to work and play in for generations to come motivates her to learn as much as possible.

Courtenay’s honours research project entails a seedbank analysis in different fire scar severity areas by collecting soil samples and germinating the seeds within the Engelmann spruce – Subalpine fir biogeoclimatic zone. With the continuing effects of climate change, wildfires are being observed more frequently at high elevation areas and it will be interesting and important to know what species of seeds are viable after different wildfire severities.

Ghassen Chaieb, PhD

Ghassen earned his PhD from the University of Bordeaux in France, where he studied plant-plant interactions in North African drylands. His research interests revolve around understanding the drivers that cause shifts and changes in plant diversity at both regional and local scales. To conduct his research, he utilizes a wide variety of tools such as fieldwork, experiments, statistical analysis, and laboratory work. Currently, at the Fraser Lab, he is engaged in various projects, including silvopasture, plant invasion, and mine reclamation.

Shu Chen

Shu is dedicated to exploring the potential of machine learning and statistical techniques to advance fire weather index forecasting. Before joining TRU in 2022, she served as a meteorological engineer at the China Meteorological Administration, where she gained experience in public weather forecast service. With a diverse interdisciplinary background, she is enthusiastic about applying advanced models and statistical approaches to address fire-weather-related challenges. She is currently working on a project which aims to compare the Fire Weather Index using numerical weather prediction model outputs across British Columbia and Alberta. She compares the forecast skills of different models and explore the applications of statistical post-processing methods.

Matthew Coghill

Matthew has been a part of the Fraser Lab in some capacity since 2015. During his time there, he has had the great fortune of helping on many student projects as well as conducting his own Master of Science project where he looked at the soil legacy effects of spotted knapweed. Matthew also collected data for a variety of international projects, including PlantPopNet, HERBDIVNET, and BIODESERT to a small extent. While he enjoys collecting field data, he had a great amount of experience with data analysis and spatial modelling using open source tools. Matthew defended his Master of Science in March 2021 and is now back at the Fraser Lab to assist with ongoing projects, as well as to help coordinate the large lab.

Gabriel Corbeil

Having spent the last seven years working for Alberta Wildfire on a unit crew, Gabriel is passionate about all aspects of wildfire research. His personal interest lies in ground crew firefighting operations. His tourism undergrad made him familiar with conducting social science. The combination of this background with his wildfire knowledge allows him to research wildfire operations from a unique point of view.

Samantha Gidora

Environmental DNA, or eDNA, sampling can determine the presence of organisms by detecting genetic material shed into the environment. This technique has been rapidly adopted as a powerful tool for monitoring aquatic ecosystems. The recent advent of eDNA air sampling for detection of terrestrial wildlife represents a revolutionary approach to evaluating biodiversity. Samantha’s thesis project will test whether the presence of bats in underground mines can be detected by sampling the air from inside. Her project includes a pilot field experiment at the New Afton Mine, and a broader field validation study at several inactive underground mines in BC’s dry interior region. The results of this research will provide insights into the value and limitations of eDNA air sampling as a tool for bat conservation and will inform our knowledge of bat use of mines in BC. With over 1,300 inactive underground mines in BC, effective, safe, and cost-efficient methods to identify and monitor underground mines used by bats are critical for balancing the needs of wildlife with mine closure and reclamation.

Tegan Heshka

As a research assistant, Tegan is helping with data entry and tree cookie sanding as a preliminary step for tree ring analysis. Currently, she is in her third year pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Natural Resource Sciences. Over the past four years, she has gained valuable experience on an Initial Attack wildfire crew with the BC Wildfire Service, which has fueled her interest in wildfire science.

Olivier Jumeau

Olivier has a strong interest in wildlife ecology and animal-wildfire relationships. He recently studied the impacts of ski-hill development on black bear diet, and is currently studying post-fire lichen regeneration in woodland caribou habitat in Ulkatcho Territory.

John Kang

John’s research involves studying soil carbon sequestration in an interior silvopasture. His site is a Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta var. latifolia) plantation that was strip-thinned into a silvopasture at three widths (10m, 15m, 20m) resulting in paired strips of pasture and forest. The cleared pastures were seeded with agronomic forage species and cattle graze the whole site throughout the growing season. John will be looking into how strip widths and grazing affect the soil carbon and microbial community. Besides his research, he has a background in botany and ecological restoration.

Chloe Kuch

Chloe’s fascination with wildfire sparked eight years ago when she started on a suppression crew with the ministry. Since then, she’s witnessed firsthand multiple record-breaking seasons which has driven her to pursue a career in wildfire management. Recently her interest lay in wildfire mitigation and bringing good fire back to the landscape through prescribed and cultural burning. Her research looks at historical fire events in the Lac du Bois Grassland Protected Area using dendrochronology.

Natalie Irene Maslowski

Natalie is completing a research based graduate thesis to understand the impacts of short-interval wildfires on forest regeneration in Glacier National Park, BC. She has experience working in spatial analysis, fire regime characterization, and fire weather analysis both within the academic field and in the context of fire management for Parks Canada.

The inland northwest will see a doubling in the occurrence of wildfires by the end of the 21st century, an increase in extreme burning conditions, and more severe mega-fires. Ecological impacts of more frequent wildfires can include fewer trees regenerating post-fire, shifts in forest type, and forests converting to other types of ecosystems. High-elevation, mountain forests in the inland northwest typically experience wildfire once every 100-200 years, but with changing climatic conditions projections indicate shorter intervals between fire events (<30 years). To characterize the ecological impacts of short-interval wildfires on high-elevation forests, we assessed vegetation regeneration in Glacier National Park. Preliminary results suggest that two consecutive high-severity wildfires resulted in minimal canopy regeneration, demonstrating the influence of order and severity on early stages of post-fire regeneration.

Sarah McIntyre

Interested in forest ecology, Sarah is assisting student-led research projects in Churn Creek Protected area, Xeni Gwet’in Title Lands (Nemiah Valley), and Glacier National Park. With a BSC in Biochemistry, she combines an analytic perspective with her fire behaviour experience from working for BC Wildfire Service in the Cariboo Fire Centre.

Cheryllee McKenny

Cheryllee is a recent graduate from the Bachelor of Natural Resource Science program at TRU. She did her undergraduate research on the use of leonardite as an amendment for ecosystem reclamation. Working at the lab, Cheryllee enjoys seeing the variety of ways that research can benefit the changing world around us while assisting masters students with their projects. She loves working with her hands to progress research in grassland and mine sites to increase knowledge in reclamation of disturbed sites.

Lorena Munoz

Lorena is a fourth-year biology student and has been a Fraser Lab member since 2022. While she is mostly focused on ornithology and evolution, her time at the lab has opened her eyes to the intricate world of plants, soils, and an entirely different spectrum of environmental studies. As a research assistant, Lorena gets to help graduate students and postdocs in their research during all stages of their projects from setting up sites and collecting data in the field, to processing samples in the lab.

Alexis Myhre

A recent recipient of the notable Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) award, Alexis’ research focuses on the historical fire regime in Nemiah Valley, British Columbia. Before her academic pursuits, Alexis worked for eight seasons with the BC Wildfire Service, supporting her experience in fire management. Upon starting her academic endeavors, Alexis started taking summer work with the Xeni Gwet’in First Nations as a Title Lands Ranger and a FireSmart Coordinator. Her fascination lies in the intersection of Indigenous knowledge and fire as a landscape management tool. She's committed to continual learning and relearning, striving to understand fire management application and ecology through diverse perspectives.

Leah Nash

Now in her final year studying Natural Resource Science, Leah transferred into the program after completing a Diploma in Integrated Environmental Planning at Selkirk College. In the summers, she works for the BC Wildfire Service as a rappel firefighter in Salmon Arm. She worked at the Rapattack base for five years, taking on a Crew Leader position for the 2023 fire season. As a research apprentice, Leah is helping with graduate students' data processing. As part of her undergrad degree, Leah is also starting two wildfire research projects: studying plant species diversity following the 2021 Churn Creek wildfire, and studying correlation between wildfire severity and FBP fuel type using spatial analysis.

Jacqueline Oliver

Jacqueline’s research is focused on predicting largescale wildland fire events (in terms of size and/or number of ignitions) across Canada and Alaska. At large spatial scales and relatively short temporal scales, these fire events often cluster in response to extreme weather events, rather than occur randomly across the landscape. This study proposes a deep convolutional neural network that is enhanced by attention mechanisms to capture localized and overarching spatial and temporal patterns, which allows richer contextualization for occurrence prediction. Analysis of the resulting model considers if mesoscale and synoptic weather patterns are captured across the study area and if there is regional variation in feature importance. This research can provide valuable information to support wildland fire suppression resource allocation, inform risk management strategies, and encourage proactive prevention measures in critical regions.

Andrea Robinson

Effects from wildfire and climate change are being seen around the world. Ecologically, fire is beneficial for the landscape, but with the build-up of fuels and increasingly extreme fire weather these effects are going beyond what is healthy for ecosystems. Historically, grassland-forest ecotones were dominated by mixed severity high frequency fires. Now, grasslands are increasingly at risk from encroachment due to conifer infilling which can lead to decreases in biodiversity, and increases in habitat loss. With the increase in fuels, these areas are also at risk from high severity wildfire; the Churn Creek Protected Area (CCPA) in British Columbia (BC) provides a case study documenting this. Colonial fire suppression has changed the fire regime to one where less frequent and more severe fire affects this ecosystem. Fuels build up changes the characteristics of a healthy ecotone to one that is vulnerable and less resilient to wildfire. This study aims to show how effectively managing these ecosystems can limit impacts from climate change, wildfire, and drought while also improving habitat for flora and fauna alike. This research will look at ecological effects on understory plant communities from prescribed fire and mechanical tree removal, non-native vegetative species invasion, and the drivers behind why encroachment is occurring in this ecosystem. This research aims to support the claim that re-introducing low severity high frequency fire onto the landscape is beneficial for mitigating encroachment, sustaining native grasses, and creating fire resilient forests in the CCPA, and therefore other grasslands of interior BC.

Leona Shepherd

Wildfires that occur during extreme fire weather events are more likely to escape initial attack by fire management agencies and threaten human lives, communities, and infrastructure. Due to the strong relationships between temperature, precipitation and fuel moisture, research suggests that western North America will experience more frequent and severe extreme fire weather events under climate change. Leona’s research investigates this relationship in the Wells Gray Provincial Park area of British Columbia. She examines trends in the extreme values (95th percentile) of the Canadian Fire Weather Index (FWI) System, as well as the frequency of weather-based potential spread days (PSDs). PSDs are defined as days in which threshold values of the Initial Spread Index of less than 8.7 are reached, indicating weather conditions that are conducive to rapidly spreading, high intensity wildfires. Past weather data is generated using ERA 5-Land climate reanalysis, and future weather data is generated using an ensemble of General Circulation Models. Weather data is then converted to FWI values, and the distribution of PSDs and extreme FWI values in the past (1991-2021) are compared to those expected in the future (2041-2100). This research is intended to contribute to the understanding of climate change impacts in British Columbia, demonstrating the need for local governments, communities, and fire management agencies to prepare for increased fire activity in the future.

Jay Singh, PhD

Jay received his PhD from Montclair State University, USA. As a soil microbial ecologist, his research focuses on understanding microbial community dynamics and soil functions in disturbed soil ecosystems. He uses high throughput sequencing and bioinformatics to study the microbial community. He is currently involved in a couple of exciting projects seeking to understand ecosystem functioning in mines and arid grasslands. The first project focuses on studying the impacts of relic DNA on microbial diversity and soil enzymatic activities in reclaimed mines. The other project examines the effect of grazing on the microbial community, plant community, and ecosystem function. His research, in general, attempts to understand whether microbes can be used for bioaugmentation to improve soil functionality.

Michael Svab

Michael is a grad of the Geomatics Engineering Technology diploma from Lethbridge College. For a graduating essay for the Natural Resource Program degree, Michael studied the use of satellite imagery and GIS for determining wildfire burn severity. Currently a research assistant for Dr. Jill Harvey, Michael is focusing mainly on GIS work.

Catherine Xiao

Catherine’s research involves the application of biosolids and seeds of herbaceous species and seedlings of shrubs for reclamation. Biosolid application can provide abundant nutrients for plant growth, thereby encouraging the growth of native species. Careful selection of native successional species can improve the stability and biodiversity of the restored ecosystem. Catherine’s field experiment will take place during the 2021 and 2022 growing seasons at two sites: one in Kamloops, and one near Princeton. This experiment involves using various ratios of biosolids as a soil amendment within local soil types in order to determine the optimal ratio of biosolid inclusion. The results of this experiment will be used to verify the feasibility of seed- and seedling-based restoration on semi-arid grassland.