Climate change threatens life on Earth as we know it and requires urgent action. Oceans are central to climate change. Not only do they regulate global climate and absorb most of the heat released by humanity, they also offer a portfolio of solutions to help combat climate change.
Motivated by our passion for the ocean, and recognition that climate change now threatens marine ecosystems and coastal communities around the world, we are working to advance understanding of the impacts of climate change in the ocean, and to inform and catalyze effective ocean conservation solutions.
We are marine scientists with diverse expertise in ecology, evolution, statistics, modelling, molecular biology, paleoecology, scientific diving, and more. United by our pragmatic optimism and our collaborative spirit, we are relentless in our pursuit of innovative science to robustly answer the questions we care most about.
Training tomorrow’s climate solutions leaders
Meeting the challenges of the climate change crisis means that every job should now be considered a climate job. Climate change and its solutions are, however, inherently place-based, with communities experiencing different impacts and having assets, challenges, and opportunities to respond. Successfully accelerating solutions thus requires that technological and scientific advances are integrated with their social, cultural, and economic contexts. Tomorrow’s climate leaders will therefore need to have a contextual understanding of proposed solutions and be adept at working across disciplinary boundaries and sectors. Through a graduate student and post-doctoral fellow training program - Coastal Climate Solutions Leaders (CCSL) - I and a team of professors at UVic aim deliver enriched interdisciplinary and intersectoral training to prepare the next generation of leaders with the knowledge, experience, and skills needed to rise to the challenge of climate change.
Assessing natural climate solutions for Canada's Oceans
The 2019 High Level Panel for A Sustainable Ocean Economy report concluded that oceans could contribute to >20% of the required climate solutions to reach the global Paris Agreement targets. Yet despite having the world’s largest coastline, Canada has not yet included oceans in its climate solutions portfolio. We aim to change that.
With NSERC Alliance support, we are leading a national research program called Blue Carbon Canada that is conducting the first national assessment of the current and future capacity for Canada's three oceans to serve as natural climate solutions.
Understanding how climate change-amplified heatwaves are impacting coastal ecosystems?
Climate change is amplifying the intensity and frequency of marine heatwaves. Over the past decade, our team documented the impacts of a globally unprecedented heatwave on coral reefs in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. We are now working to understand the impacts of that same heatwave on kelp forests along British Columbia’s coastline. Our discoveries are changing understanding of how ecosystems respond to and recover from these events.
Working in partnership with academic, eNGO, First Nations and government collaborators, we apply a suite of tools - field observations and experiments, molecular analyses and bioinformatics, stable isotopes, interviews, historical ecology, meta-analyses, and synthesis of large data sets using statistical models - to answer these and other pressing ocean climate change questions. We are committed to making science a more equitable, diverse and inclusive enterprise, to open science and data sharing, and to engagement with the public and policy-makers aimed at enhancing climate change understanding and action.
Lab News
This fall we had a wonderful writing retreat in Port Renfrew, Vancouver Island. It was a relaxing but still productive weekend that left everyone feeling accomplished. We will definitely be doing that again., Nov 2024
We kicked off the 2024 academic year with an afternoon at Willows Beach, where we had had a good discussions, goal-setting, great food, and fun games, followed by laser tag!, Sept 2024
Kaitlyn masterfully defended her masters today! We are so proud of her and excited to see how her research based in the Maldives gets used in reef conservation., August 2024
The official announcement of our collaborative DFO funded project (started in 2023) with The Kelp Rescue Initiative is out today! Watch the CTV feature here or read about it here or in the UVic press release., June 2024
Photo Credits: Kiritimati coral reef (Kieran Cox), Kelp & boat (Kevin Bruce), Estuary (Michael Snyder), Kelp (Goya Ngan), Julia sampling coral (Kristina Tietjen), Kelp (Goya Ngan), BC coast (Kristina Tietjen)
“We stand now where two roads diverge but unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road - the one less traveled by - offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”
— Rachel Carson, Silent Spring