UNews - Jenny McCune

Canada’s plant conservation efforts fall short

caroline.zentner — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 16:51:26 +0000

Plants comprise the largest percentage of species at risk in Canada, yet conservation biologists and researchers involved in plant-related work say the country needs to do much more to protect these plants.

Dr. Jenny McCune, a ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge biology professor with expertise in plant conservation, and a team of researchers from universities across Canada surveyed 243 people who work in plant conservation or do research in plant ecology and evolution to assess the state of plant conservation in Canada. The results have been published in the interdisciplinary journal FACETS.

Dr. Jenny McCune is growing wood poppies, one of Canada's endangered plants, in the greenhouse at Science Commons.

“Most respondents agreed that Canada is underperforming or merely average when it comes to conserving plants,” says McCune. “If we saved all the plants currently on the list of species at risk, we could reduce that list by nearly one-third! By not doing enough to help endangered plants, we’re missing a huge opportunity to conserve biodiversity.”

Few of the plants listed in Canada’s Species at Risk Act (SARA) have improved their status over time. Plant diversity is concentrated in the warmer southern regions, where most people live and most of the land is privately owned. However, most landowners are unaware of plant species at risk growing on their property. SARA doesn’t automatically protect these plants, and while provinces may have species-at-risk laws, they may not be enforced on private lands.

“Canada lacks a national strategy for plant conservation even though it is a party to the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation,” says McCune. “Such a strategy could bring experts together to share knowledge and unify isolated local and provincial plant conservation efforts.”

Responses to the survey resulted in recommendations that include advocating for laws that protect habitat and their enforcement, connecting researchers with knowledge gaps and existing funding opportunities, and providing support for graduate student research in applied plant conservation.

Further, increasing public awareness of rare plants could help conservation efforts, as research has shown that most landowners are willing to help rare species but need guidance in doing so. Alberta’s MULTISAR (Multiple Species at Risk) is an example of a successful program that partners with landowners to protect species at risk, including plants. Also, consulting Indigenous knowledge holders and communities as part of recovery strategies could help improve the success of this work. Connecting researchers with local conservation groups and land stewards could improve the monitoring of rare plant populations and management strategies to recover plant species at risk.

“While Canada has a long way to go to conserve plant diversity effectively, conservation biologists and researchers are eager to contribute,” says McCune. “If Canada is to improve its progress towards the goals of the Convention on Biological Diversity, the federal government must commit to improving the conservation of plants.”

Canada is one of 150 countries to sign on to the Convention on Biological Diversity, which is dedicated to promoting sustainable development.

After the fire — how plant life is recovering following the Kenow wildfire

caroline.zentner — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 20:10:26 +0000

��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge researchers have been monitoring plant life in Waterton Lakes National Park to see how they’re responding following the massive Kenow wildfire in 2017.

“We know we have increasing fires on the landscape recently, so plant communities are going to have to deal with that,” says Dr. Jenny McCune, a ULethbridge biology professor. “But then we also have increases in human-caused stressors like recreation. There’s a real question about how those two different sources of stress will interact and whether one will magnify the effects of the other.”

Jed Lloren, a master's student, and undergraduate field assistants David Musk and Kirsty McFadyen survey the plant community at a burned site.

In the second and third growing seasons after the fire, McCune and her students examined both burned and unburned plots that were originally surveyed in the mid-1990s to compare the plant species present. They wanted to know how plant life is being affected by stressors like wildfire and increased human presence.

Since the original surveys were done, the number of park visitors has gone from about 300,000 per year to more than 500,000 per year. The effect of the increase in visitors is mainly on the trails in the park, potentially increasing the spread of seeds on boots and clothing.

“Our study was trying to test the way that these plants are responding to the fire — is it different if they’re closer to a trail than if they’re far from a trail?” she says.

All the burned plots had massive shifts in the composition of plants, regardless of how close they were to a trail.

“Mostly this was because of all the species that were lost during the fire,” says McCune. “Lots of species that were in those plots in the 1990s were wiped out when the fire came through. We thought the shifts in the plant composition might be greater closer to trails, but that wasn’t the case. But then in the plots that didn’t burn, what’s interesting was they had greater shifts farther from trails, which is the opposite of what we expected.”

The researchers suspect the shifts in plant life may be due to increasing tree density in the forest and forest encroaching on grasslands. The expanding canopy cover provides an environment for shade-tolerant plants and more woody plants to grow, causing them to increase in the unburned areas.

Fireweed is a native plant that thrives after fire.

“It was almost more fascinating to look at what happened in the plots that didn’t burn,” she says. “We know what happened in the burn. Pretty much all the trees were killed. Almost everything was severely burned. Afterwards, the fire followers come in like fireweed and dragonhead. We mostly found what we were expecting in the burned plots.”

Of particular concern in the park is the spread of exotic plants. Exotic plants are species that are not native to the area, some of which are invasive. The researchers expected to see more exotics appearing in burned plots that were closer to a trail.

“We didn’t see that,” says McCune. “However, we did see that plant species that are associated with disturbance, which can be native or exotic, increased significantly in the burned plots and increased even more if the burned plot was close to a trail.”

McCune says plant recovery needs to be tracked over the long term.

From left to right are Cooper Hayward, Parks Canada co-op student, Dr. Peter Achuff and Jed Lloren, a ULethbridge master's student.

“In the plots that burned, on average, about 40 per cent of the plant species that were there in 1995 were still there after the fire. I found that pretty astonishing given how severe the fire was. It really speaks to the resilience of these communities.”

She and her students will be returning to the same plots this summer, which is the seventh growing season post-fire. The researchers will be tracking whether these communities go back to the same composition and the same species as before the fire or if they go off in a different trajectory.

“This is a great partnership we have with Parks Canada and the main botanist who did some of the surveys in the 1990s, Dr. Peter Achuff, is still around and working with us,” says McCune. “We hope to keep following these plots over many years.”

Some of the findings were recently published in the journal Landscape Ecology.

��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge biologist finds a new tool to help save endangered plant species

caroline.zentner — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 20:03:42 +0000

Dr. Jenny McCune, a ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge biology professor, collaborated with an up-and-coming filmmaker to produce a documentary designed to focus greater public attention on endangered plant species and her fight to save them.

The Quiet Green Creatures highlights the work McCune and her students are doing in southern Ontario to boost the sustainability of two endangered plant species, the wood poppy and crooked-stem aster.

The number of plant species at risk in Canada outweighs endangered animals, she says, yet their plight hasn’t seemed to catch the public’s interest to the same degree.

“They're part of our wildlife, and they're just as worthy of us making sure they're doing OK and understanding why they're so rare,” she says. “And if the main reason they're so rare is because of what we're doing — namely, chopping down most of the forest that they used to live in —then we might have to help them if we’re going to keep them around.”

Neither of the two species being studied is crucial in the development of life-saving medicines and both also grow in the United States. That doesn’t mean their extinction from Canada wouldn’t be a loss.

Dr. Jenny McCune is surrounded by wood-poppy plants in the ULethbridge greenhouse.

“It would reduce the amazing diversity of different life forms that we have in this country,” says McCune, adding it’s important to appreciate the plants as unique outcomes of evolution which deserve equal rights to exist.

As a graduate student, she attended a workshop on the importance of communicating one’s research to the public. With that in mind, McCune decided to shoot some video with a GoPro camera while she and her crew were doing field research last summer. Upon returning to ULethbridge, she approached Professor William Smith in the Department of New Media, who put her in contact with Rodrigo Henriquez (BFA - New Media ’20).

With an interest in science and conservation, he was happy to put the skills he had learned in the classroom to the test. Henriquez, who just finished his first year towards a master’s, thoroughly enjoyed editing the raw video and working with McCune on the voice-over to produce a short documentary easily digestible by the public.

“The opportunity to do this type of documentary doesn’t come up very often. And since I am an academic and I do love that type of stuff, being able to use my talents and abilities to help out was just icing on the cake,” says the co-founder of Starset Media, adding he’d welcome more work along those same lines.

The Quiet Green Creatures also provides interested students with a real-life glimpse of research work in the field. McCune says it was an added bonus that the enthusiasm of doctoral students Emma Neigel and Amy Wiedenfeld, and undergraduates Carisa McGale and Kirsty McFadyen shines through in the video.

Student-researchers and project partners in the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Nature Conservancy of Canada, the Wilder Institute and the Kayanase plant nursery are vital to McCune’s work.

Wood-poppy plants, grown by research partners in Ontario, are readied for transplanting. Photo by Allison Scovil, Wilder Institute/Calgary Zoo.

McCune and her students are studying the wood poppy and crooked-stem aster in forest land fragmented by a growing number of crop fields and subdivisions. They are trying to determine why the plants are so rare, the habitat they require to survive and thrive, and whether they are candidates for conservation translocation – the practice of introducing plants in new habitats on protected land to safeguard their sustainability.

While conservation translocation has proven successful in Canada with animals, such as the reintroduction of the swift fox population in Alberta and Saskatchewan, the practice doesn’t have the same history here when it comes to plants. McCune’s research could assist in determining its viability.

Federal government needs to do more to protect endangered plants, says U of L researcher

caroline.zentner — Mon, 13 Jul 2020 15:33:40 +0000

Canada’s plants are the middle child of species conservation in Canada, receiving far less attention than mammals and birds. Even though plants and lichens make up 37 per cent of Canada’s at-risk species, the federal funding they receive is less than a third of that number.

Dr. Jenny McCune, a ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge professor in biological sciences and Board of Governors Research Chair in Plant Conservation, and Peter Morrison, a graduate student at McGill ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ, examined how many plant species listed under the Species at Risk Act (SARA) grow on private or federal lands. Plants listed under SARA are only protected from destruction only if they grow on federal land.

Dr. Jenny McCune is growing wood poppies, one of Canada's endangered plants, in the greenhouse at Science Commons.

McCune and Morrison also looked at how plants fared under Canada’s two programs that encourage protection and stewardship of at-risk species on private lands. The Natural Areas Conservation Program (NACP) provides funds to help buy land for conservation. The Habitat Stewardship Program (HSP) provides funds for projects by conservation groups, provincial or municipal governments to help species at risk. Their study has been published in FACETS, a Canadian multidisciplinary science journal.

“The results of our study show the Canadian government could do much more to foster research, conserve and monitor plant species at risk, especially those on private lands,” says McCune. “Plants are a huge part of Canada’s biodiversity; Canadians value them for the things they provide us and for their beauty and uniqueness."

The researchers examined publicly available government documents and found that 75 per cent of all listed plants under SARA grow at least partly on private land and 35 per cent grow mainly on private land. Only 10 per cent grow mainly on federal land.

“With one in three endangered plants growing mainly on private land, our study highlights the importance of plant stewardship by landowners,” says McCune. “Programs like the NACP and the HSP that help protect plants on non-federal land are crucial to encourage this stewardship and prevent destruction of endangered plants. We need more funding and more projects working to conserve at-risk plants if we’re going to get them off the endangered species list.”

July 1 marks the start for six new U of L Board of Governors Research Chairs

caroline.zentner — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 16:23:14 +0000

Six diverse scholars will begin their appointments as Board of Governors Research Chairs, highlighting their exceptional work and impacts on their chosen fields of study.

“I am very pleased these individuals are being recognized as the outstanding scholars that they are,” says Dr. Robert Wood, interim vice-president (research). “They reflect the exceptional quality of research being done across the academic disciplines at the U of L and their important work enhances our reputation as one of Canada’s most influential research institutions.”

Dr. Debra Basil, a professor in the Dhillon School of Business, will begin a five-year term as a Tier I Research Chair in Marketing and Management. Her research examines social responsibility with marketing and management, with a focus on the nexus of non-profit and for-profit organizations. She has held several major external grants and her works have been presented in numerous national and international journals and conferences. She is currently completing a book titled Social Marketing in Action: Cases from Around the World.

Also appointed at the Tier I level is Dr. Chris Hopkinson, a professor in the Department of Geography & Environment. He will be the Research Chair in Terrestrial Ecosystem Remote Sensing. Hopkinson founded the ARTeMIS Lab for ecosystem change in 2013, when he joined the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge after working as an Environmental Research Scientist with the Australian Government. With a background in engineering and geography, Hopkinson integrates hydro-meteorological, remote sensing, spatial and temporal data sources to better understand multi-dimensional natural resource and ecosystem process dynamics in cold region environments.

Mary Kavanagh begins a five-year term as a Tier I Research Chair in Fine Arts. Kavanagh is a visual artist and professor in the Department of Art, where she teaches drawing, interdisciplinary studio, spatial art practice and critical theory. For more than 20 years, her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Canada and abroad, and she has consistently contributed to academic forums including publishing, lecturing, conference publications and adjudicating.

Beginning a four-year appointment as a Tier II Research Chair in Addiction is Dr. Darren Christensen, an associate professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences. He researches the etiology, prevention, and treatment of addiction. His research includes developing behavioural treatments for problem gambling, evaluations of the effectiveness of harm minimization measures, and an investigation of regular opioid antagonist dosing on gambling urge and brain function.

Dr. Richard Larouche, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences’ Public Health Program, has been appointed a Tier II Research Chair in Children’s Physical Activity for a four-year term. He joined the Faculty in 2017 after a postdoctoral fellowship at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute. His research program revolves around physical activity among children and youth, with special interest in different types of physical activity such as active transportation (e.g., walking and cycling to and from places) and outdoor play. Larouche published his first book in 2018 with Elsevier entitled, Children’s Active Transportation.

Also at the Tier II level, Dr. Jenny McCune has been appointed as Board of Governors Research Chair in Plant Conservation for four years. McCune, a faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences, completed her undergraduate degree at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Guelph and graduate degrees at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Kent in the United Kingdom and the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of British Columbia. Between degrees, she worked as a professional ecologist for an environmental NGO in California and as a biologist for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. Prior to joining the U of L, she held a Liber Ero fellowship, which supported her work in the conservation of rare plants in Canada.

Research paper opens eyes on how much pollution may be affecting our endangered species

trevor.kenney — Wed, 27 Nov 2019 17:51:01 +0000

As threats to plant and animal species across Canada continue to escalate, a new study, led by ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge plant ecologist Dr. Jenny McCune, has provided a baseline look at how sources of pollution overlap the known ranges of nearly 500 at-risk species.

Maps of Canada showing (A) the number of threatened species (listed by COSEWIC, SARA, or both) in each 100km2 grid square. Marine fish, marine reptiles, and marine mammals are not mapped. Grid squares with no records of any threatened species are black. No records were available for Nunavut (white), and (B) the number of pollution categories with mapped pollution sources within each 100km2 grid cell that also contains a record for one or more threatened species. Grid squares with no records of any threatened species are black (note that this does not necessarily indicate there are no pollution sources). No species data was available for Nunavut (white).

The research paper, published recently in the journal FACETS, notes that of the nearly 500 at-risk species, on average, 57 per cent of the area inhabited by each species also contained at least one source of pollution. Yet, the official status reports for many species do not mention pollution as a potential threat, even for those with a high degree of coincidence with pollution sources.

“We probably expected the overlap to be high because Canada’s biodiversity is concentrated in the south as is our human population and therefore the bulk of our industrial activity,” says McCune, a professor in the U of L’s Department of Biological Sciences.

McCune is quick to note the difference between scope and severity. While McCune and her colleagues have mapped sources of pollution across Canada and calculated their spatial overlap with the species at risk, that work only translates to scope, in other words, what percentage of species might be affected by and is coming into contact with a threat.

“Many of these pollutants could be harmless to us and to the species we’re worried about but our idea is that some of them could be, if not causing declines in species, potentially making it worse and adding stress to these species that are already on the edge,” she says.

McCune is a Liber Ero Fellow, a post-doctoral fellowship program that supports research and training of emerging conservation leaders during the early stages of their careers. The group, which was initiated in 2013, adds up to five fellows per year and has grown to nearly 30 representatives who are spread out across the country. This latest paper, with McCune the lead author, is one of many ongoing projects with which the fellows are involved.

“In Canada, the biggest threats to species are loss of habitat to residential and commercial development, trampling and disturbance through recreation, and introduced invasive species,” says McCune. “Pollution in the form of invisible contaminants of the air, soil and water could be kicking species when they are already down. Most of the thousands of chemicals released to the environment are not tracked, nor their impact on plants and animals measured. The goal of our study was to quantify the potential for pollution to affect individual species at risk in Canada.”

She maintains that more work needs to be done but that her group’s paper can serve as a reference point for further research.

“We need more research into the impact of contaminants on species at risk in Canada to measure the degree to which pollution is adding to the problem,” she says. “We want this to be a tool where people can actually look up the species they are working on and see how much of their habitat is actually coincident with a source of pollution. They can then use that as a baseline for assessing severity.”

A link to the FACETS article can be found here: https://medium.com/facets/pollution-might-be-a-bigger-threat-to-endangered-species-in-canada-than-we-think-15bcaae1831.

UNews - Jenny McCune

Canada’s plant conservation efforts fall short

Related Topics

After the fire — how plant life is recovering following the Kenow wildfire

Related Topics

��Ѹ�����Դ���߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge biologist finds a new tool to help save endangered plant species

Related Topics

Federal government needs to do more to protect endangered plants, says U of L researcher

Related Topics

July 1 marks the start for six new U of L Board of Governors Research Chairs

Related Topics

Research paper opens eyes on how much pollution may be affecting our endangered species

Related Topics

��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge biologist finds a new tool to help save endangered plant species