L’Oréal Canada for Women in Science Research Excellence Fellowships

Marie-Pier Hébert is an environmental scientist specialised in freshwater and global change ecology.

Over the last 15 years, she developed a growing interest and sense of care for freshwater ecosystems, especially lakes, and the small living things inhabiting them. She studies how lakes work, change across seasons and respond to global environmental changes, to ultimately evaluate how this knowledge can be used to anticipate the future. Her postdoctoral research addresses a largely unexplored dimension of climate change: the ecological consequences of warming winters and ice loss for lakes.

Her main projects evaluate how changing winter conditions affect the ecology, nutritional quality (like healthy omega-3s) and health of lake food webs, from tiny plankton at the base of food chains to large fish targeted by subsistence fisheries. The sheer size of Canada’s territory provides an opportunity to study how lake food webs change along a natural gradient of winter severity and lake ice duration (ranging 2–10 months across temperate, boreal and polar biomes).

She combines data collected from Canadian lakes in winter with global syntheses of winter freshwater resources, to predict future ecological–nutritional changes with warming winters from spatial changes observed in Canada and abroad. Collectively, her work aims to offer a scientific foundation to foster sustainable practices for freshwater resources in cold-winter regions.

Dr. Morgan Piczak completed her Master’s at McMaster University studying threats facing common snapping turtles in Lake Ontario. From there, she worked at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, where Morgan studied the impacts of harmful algal blooms on the fish community of Lake Erie. After that, she completed her PhD at Carleton University, where her research examined the efficacy of ecological restoration on fish habitat in Lake Ontario. Now, Morgan is a post-doctoral researcher at Dalhousie University supported by the Liber Ero Fellowship Program and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Through her applied research, Morgan will help generate conservation and management strategies for imperilled Atlantic mackerel, which have experienced concerning population declines.