Biodiversity in Alberta's Water

Ecosystems with greater biodiversity are healthier, more adaptable and resistant to change, and more stable. Biodiversity ensures the health of ecosystems and habitats that support essential living resources, including wildlife, fisheries and forests. It also provides for basic human needs such as food, shelter, and medicine. A variety of species maintain oxygen in the air, enrich the soil, purify the water, and regulate climate. Biodiversity also has recreational, cultural, spiritual and aesthetic values. Depsite the immense importance of biodiversity, we are currently causing the sixth great extinction in the multi-billion year history of the earth.

University of Alberta Research

Compensatory species dynamics and grazing in recovering acidified lakes: regulation of biological recovery responses Kristy Hogsden is studying with Rolf Vinebrooke in the Department of Biological Sciences, and is researching how grazing pressures differ in lakes recovering from acidification. She is exploring the dynamics of algal communtities and those that feed on them, and also how ecological roles change between different algal species and between different consumer species.