Congratulations: School of Environmental Studies, prestigious award

(March 1, 2017) - The Faculty of Social Sciences is proud to announce the recent prestigious award to the School of Environmental Studies and two of its professors, Dr Brian Starzomski, who holds the Ian McTaggart Cowan Professorship in Biodiversity Conservation and Ecological Restoration, and Darcy Mathews, Assistant Professor, along with current Starzomski Lab members PhD student Kira Hoffman, post-doc Wiebe Nijland, and former post-doc Andrew Trant (now at the University of Waterloo) for their outstanding contribution to the fields of plant ecology & biogeography.

The Environmental Studies team and colleagues, including co-authors Duncan McLaren (UVic Anthropology) and Trisalyn Nelson (Arizona State University) were recognized for their research study "Intertidal resource use over millennia enhances forest productivity," published in Nature Communications last year. In the study, the team from the Starzomski Lab found that 13,000 years of repeated human occupation by coastal First Nations has had the opposite effect one might expect, enhancing rather than depleting temperate rainforest productivity. 

The group will accept this prestigious award at the ESA’s annual meeting in Portland, OR on August 7.

Research funding was provided through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Hakai, and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.

Read the ESA media release.