GRIL Montreal

Location: Montréal, Québec, Canada
Associated Universities: Concordia University, McGill University, University of Montréal, and University of Québec at Montréal
Program Dates: Summer 2020

About GRIL:

The GRIL – the Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en limnologie – is a limnology group based in Québec, Canada. In true Canadian style, it is a bilingual group going by the English name of the Interuniversity Group in Limnology. It is the Montréal members of the GRIL who are participating as a LOREX site, bringing together labs from across four major Canadian universities: Concordia University, McGill University, University of Montréal and University of Québec at Montréal (UQAM). Our universities offer state-of-the art limnological facilities, and in Montréal the GRIL runs two large analytical labs focusing on freshwater analyses. Together with these urban universities, we offer access to several field stations: the Laurentians Biological Station (Station de Biologie des Laurentides) north of Montréal and south-east of the city at the Gault Nature Reserve and the Lake Memphremagog sites. Access to many lakes and streams is possible in the region in both the Laurentians and Eastern Townships areas within a 1-2 hour drive from the city, as well as to the Saint-Lawrence River. The GRIL in Montréal brings together many of Canada’s most important and active researchers in limnology within a highly integrated network offering unique opportunities to LOREX participants. To learn more, visit the GRIL website: http://www.gril-limnologie.ca/

The members listed below are participating in LOREX. You can learn more about them by viewing their GRIL directory information (in French) which has links to their lab websites.

• Marc Amyot’s research (University of Montreal) aims to better understand the transport and transformations of contaminants in aquatic ecosystems, from the source to the plate, in a changing world.
• Bernard Angers’ lab (University of Montreal) focuses on the effects of evolutionary processes on fish populations.
• Beatrix Beisner’s lab (University of Quebec at Montreal, UQAM) focuses on community ecology and food web interactions in lake plankton, including functional trait and metacommunity approaches.
• Elena Bennett’s lab (McGill University) focuses on human-environment interactions to improve ecosystem management.
• Sandra Ann Binning’s group (University of Montreal) is interested in how fish and other aquatic organisms respond behaviourally and physiologically to stressors such as temperature, hypoxia, water flow and parasites.
• Pascale Biron’s group (Concordia University) studies how to integrate hydrogeomorphological concepts to enhance resilience of fluvial systems in perturbed environments.
• Daniel Boisclair’s group (University of Montreal) aims to improve our capacity to explain the spatial distribution of freshwater fish using either bioenergetic or habitat quality models.
• Sophie Breton’s group (University of Montreal) is focused on understanding the role of mitochondria and their genomes in adaptation and speciation.
• Melania Cristescu’s group (McGill University) addresses fundamental questions about the evolution and maintenance of biological diversity in aquatic systems with contributions in three main areas: 1) the genetics of aquatic invasions and habitat transitions; 2) molecular methods for aquatic biomonitoring and biosecurity; 3) the nature and scale of recombination and mutation rate variation across genomes, populations and species.
• Paul del Giorgio’s group (University of Quebec at Montreal, UQAM) carries out research at the interface between aquatic biogeochemistry and microbial ecology, exploring the origin, transformation and fate of carbon, the dynamics of green house gases, and the assemblage of microbial communities within complex freshwater networks.
• Alison Derry’s lab (University of Quebec at Montreal, UQAM) addresses ‘eco-evolutionary interactions’, which is the reciprocal interplay between evolution in populations and the ecology of freshwater populations, communities, and ecosystems, especially as a response to human disturbance.
• Jan Franssen (University of Montreal) investigates the processes that control the storage and flow of water, with particular interest in the role of hydrogeomorphic and hydroecologic processes in sustaining freshwater ecosystems, using field studies and experiments to study hydrological processes in eastern Canada; from urbanizing southern watersheds to high arctic permafrost settings.
• Dylan Fraser’s lab (Concordia University) integrates ecology, evolution and genetics towards conservation and management of natural fish populations.
• Gregor Fussmann’s group at McGill University combines experimental and theoretical approaches to understand the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of aquatic communities exposed to environmental change.
• Irene Gregory-Eaves’ group (McGill University) is focused on understanding how environmental and climate change alter the structure and functioning of lakes across the Anthropocene.
• Andrew Hendry’s lab (McGill University) studies how ecological changes influence evolutionary dynamics (eco-to-evo), and the reciprocal arrow of causality: how evolutionary changes influence ecological dynamics (evo-to-eco).
• Philippe Juneau’s group (University of Quebec at Montreal, UQAM) investigates the impacts of anthropogenic environmental factors in the context of climate change on phytoplankton at the biochemical and physiological levels.
• Jean-François Lapierre’s group (Université de Montréal) is interested in the landscape level patterns in aquatic carbon - and associated elements - cycling.
• Cassandre Lazar’s group (University of Quebec at Montreal, UQAM) is interested in microbial ecology of terrestrial subsurface habitats: who is there and how do they interact with their environment.
• Pierre Legendre (University of Montreal) is Founder of Numerical Ecology and specialist of beta diversity analysis. Develops and uses multivariate statistical models to analyse the spatial and spatio-temporal structure of ecological communities.
• Roxane Maranger’s lab (University of Montreal) works on characterizing how human activities and climate change influence physical, and biological control points of major biogeochemical cycles and how these impact water quality.
• Bernadette Pinel-Alloul (University of Montreal) is focused on understanding how climate and environmental heterogeneity among freshwater ecosystems influence zooplankton community structure, function and food-web interactions.
• Dolors Planas’ lab (University of Quebec at Montreal, UQAM) is interested in mercury methylation in periphyton biofilms and its transfer to fish through benthic and pelagic habitat coupling in lakes and rivers.
• Yves Prairie’s lab (University of Quebec at Montreal, UQAM) is in interested in all things carbon; working particularly on the dynamics of carbon gases, CO2 and CH4, their production and consumption processes and how they are modulated by physical constraints. Working in temperate, boreal and tropical regions, the goal of our research program is to develop models that are sufficiently robust to allow the upscaling of greenhouse gas fluxes at all scales, from local to global.
• Anthony Ricciardi’s group (McGill University) investigates how invasive species alter the diversity and abundance of invertebrates and fishes in freshwater ecosystems, and how these impacts are mediated by climate change and other environmental variables.
• Maikel Rosabal’s group (University of Quebec at Montreal, UQAM) investigates the toxicological effects of trace metals in aquatic organisms using metallomics and proteomic approaches. This group also works on determining subcellular metal-handling strategies used by aquatic organisms to cope with highly metal-contaminated environments.
• Sébastien Sauvé’s lab (University of Montreal) focuses on the chemical and ecotoxicological evaluation of emerging contaminants in the environment.
• Jesse Shapiro’s group (University of Montreal) uses population genomics, metagenomics, and deep amplicon sequencing to learn about microbial ecology and evolution, in ecosystems ranging from cyanobacterial bloom-impacted lakes to the human gut.
• David Walsh’s group (Concordia University) explores the ecology and evolution of aquatic microbial communities in lakes and oceans from a genomics perspective.

This program is supported by NSF grant #1831075, 2019-2021.