Global change is reshaping biodiversity across scales.
From the genetic makeup of populations to the composition of species in ecological communities, biodiversity is undergoing rapid change. Yet, accurately predicting the future state of populations, communities, and ecosystems remains a formidable challenge. This is because direct changes in the abundance and phenotypic traits of a population will often indirectly affect other populations because they are connected through a network of ecological interactions. Thus, anticipating the consequences of these indirect interactions is critical for protecting biodiversity and sustaining ecosystems into the future.
Food webs link biodiversity across scales.
An organism’s ‘need to feed’ creates direct and indirect links between species in a community, called a food web. ‘Who-eats-whom’ in a food web is determined by an organism’s traits, which are in turn shaped by its genes and environment. This web of feeding interactions influences the resilience of a community to environmental change and shapes the flow of energy through an ecosystem. Thus, food-web interactions form a ‘living engine’ that links biodiversity across scales—from genes to ecosystems.
We combine tools from genetics, molecular biology, and community ecology to study how food webs are changing.
We use field and lab experiments to gain insight to the mechanisms underlying the changes in food-web interactions we observe. We develop theory and statistical models that are tailored to the biology of the organisms we study (usually plants and insects). We also work collaboratively with local and international experts to tackle the interdisciplinary challenges of our research.
Plants and insects inspire our work.
Together, plants and insects dominate the biomass and diversity of life on Earth. Improving our understanding of their food-web interactions is thus key for predicting how terrestrial ecosystems will respond to environmental change. That’s why much of our empirical work explores the ecology and coevolution of intimate interactions among plants, insect herbivores, and insect parasitoids or predators.
We believe that understanding the ecology and evolution of food webs will inform how we can act to protect biodiversity and sustain ecosystems into the future.
Join Our Lab
We are recruiting new members to join our group in the Department of Biology at the Université de Sherbrooke.