Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Forests in Alberta and the interior of BC naturally experience frequent abiotic and biotic disturbances. These disturbances include insect infestations, disease, windthrow, and fire. Human reliance on forests for fiber and other products also results in disturbances such as clearing, burning, and road building. Examples of large--scale disturbances in western Canadian forests include the mountain pine beetle outbreak in BC and now Alberta, massive fires in both provinces in recent years, and the growing spruce beetle infestation near Prince George. Estimates of the impact of the mountain pine beetle infestation in BC vary but tend towards about 18 million hectares affected. The mountain pine beetle escaped the confines of the northern Rocky Mountains for the first time in recorded history, and is now active in Alberta lodgepole pine, jack pine, and hybrid pine stands and may spread through Canada's boreal region in the coming years. The massive mountain pine beetle infestation in the central interior - combined with hotter, drier summers due to climate change - likely exacerbated the record--setting 1.2 million hectares of forest fires in BC during the summer of 2017. Alberta has also experienced recent massive and dangerous fires (e.g. Slave Lake and Fort McMurray). In what may turn out to be an analogy to the mountain pine infestation, the spruce beetle has begun to erupt over a substantial land base, particularly to the northeast of Prince George. In 2017, the annual provincial aerial pest survey showed 501873 ha affected across the province by the spruce beetle, up from 281497 ha in 2016. These past and ongoing disturbances, combined with human interactions and interventions, mean that there is now a great deal of uncertainty about what the future forest in western Canada will look like - although it will certainly be different from the forest of the past. The arthropod community is a vital component of any healthy ecosystem - the ongoing provision of ecosystem services and long term stand--level recovery depend on the composition and succession of arthropod assemblages. The in-stream habitat of riparian ecosystems depends on the terrestrial arthropods present in the riparian zone. However, very little work has been done on arthropod biodiversity and community ecology in western Canadian forests in the context of current massive disturbances. There are few contemporary checklists of arthropod species in these regional disturbance contexts, so baseline information is also less--than--adequate. My overall objective is to use insect trapping methods and morphological and DNA barcode-assisted taxonomic analyses to examine differences between affected and unaffected disturbed western Canadian forests and riparian zones in terms of both taxonomic and functional diversity in order to understand shifts in ecological services following disturbance and to provide managers with tools to monitor the recovery of stands.