Professor Lenore Fahrig Receives Carleton Achievement Award for Innovative Research – Exchange
Morning Post
Publication: Exchange Morning Post
Date: Wednesday February 9th, 2011
Source: http://www.exchangemagazine.com/morningpost/2011/week6/Wednesday/020915.htm
Summary
Ottawa – Carleton professor Lenore Fahrig is one of 10 recipients of this year’s Carleton Research Achievement Awards that honour innovative researchers for their work that helps find solutions to real-world problems. The other nine are being announced during Carleton’s Research Days celebration that ends on Friday, Feb. 11.
Fahrig, a biology professor and wildlife ecologist, will be using the $15,000 honorarium to research how a variety of agricultural crops and their planting patterns affect birds, butterflies, syrrphid flies, bees, carabid beetles, spiders and plants in 100 one-square-kilometre agricultural landscapes throughout Eastern Ontario.
“Our ultimate goal is to create guidelines that will help inform farmers of best practices that they can use to protect biodiversity in agricultural landscapes,” says Fahrig.
This project is being funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and is supported by Environment Canada, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Ontario Ministry of Agriculture Food and Rural Affairs, Food Alliance, Dairy Farmers of Canada and Organic Agriculture Centre of Canada.
Fahrig works with colleagues Doug King, Scott Mitchell and Kathryn Lindsay in the Geomatics and Landscape Ecology Facility for Research in Support of Species Conservation at Carleton. Lindsay is an adjunct professor in Biology and Geography/Environmental Science at Carleton who works with Environment Canada. The GLEL was built in 2004 with funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, Ontario Innovation Trust, Carleton University, Environment Canada and the Hamlin Family Foundation.
In addition to her work on agricultural landscapes, Fahrig and her graduate students have spent the last 20 years identifying which wildlife species are most affected by roads and traffic, with the goal of influencing environmental policy and management.
“Many animals, even small ones such as amphibians, attempt to cross roads in the course of their normal movements,” points out Fahrig. “This is particularly dangerous for amphibians and reptiles which travel at a slow speed.”
Fahrig thinks a good solution to the problem is fencing to keep animals off roads, combined with wildlife overpasses. “But so far there is very little research to test whether wildlife populations are increasing as a result of these installations,” she notes.