Katherine Griffiths, Postdoctoral fellow

Department of Biology, McGill University

Contact

I am interested in using lake sediments to infer past environmental changes to help provide a temporal context for the environmental challenges we are facing. This is especially important as most lakes have no long-term monitoring and we rarely know what the pre-impact conditions are, as monitoring is often enacted in response to a crisis.

LakePulse survey sampling 680 lakes across Canada

Summer 2018: Sampling lakes with a field team!

Summer 2017: Field team leader for Green team (3 weeks).

Research project: Changes in Canadian lakes over the Anthropocene; which lakes are susceptible to different stressors

I will be examining the diatom assemblages in top and bottom sediments from sediment cores to see how lakes across Canada have changed in response to various anthropogenic stressors over the past ~200 years.

I hope to address some of the following questions: Are the patterns of environmental impacts, as reflected in the changing diatom assemblages, the same across the ecoregions? What proportion of lakes have been affected? Is the diatom response to the anthropogenic stressors the same across ecoregions?

Project start to finish dates: July 2017-June 2021

Supervisors: Dr. Irene Gregory-Eaves