Research Team

I am fortunate to work with a group of remarkable colleagues, students and staff. See below for current and past members of my research team.

Present Team Members

Claire Wright, PhD student

Joined Fall 2021

Claire is an outdoor enthusiast based in Victoria. She is grateful to live and learn on the territory of the Lək̓ʷəŋən Peoples, and the Songhees, Esquimalt, and WSÁNEĆ Peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day. Claire has a BSc in Environmental Toxicology with a certificate in Geographic Information Science. Her undergraduate thesis focused on carbon dioxide exchange in the High Arctic. Claire's current research centers around using the Mountain Legacy Project collection to study rapid ecological change in Canada's mountain parks. Her work is supported by the Foothills Research Institute in partnership with Mitacs. Claire is passionate about integrating geospatial analysis with practical knowledge of restoration to support responsible intervention on the ground. She believes that all restoration and management decisions should be made collaboratively in a way that respects the inherent rights of Indigenous Peoples. When she is not glued to her computer, she will undoubtedly be found up on a mountain looking for new adventures.

Sarah Jacobs, Postdoctoral Fellow

Sarah is an anthropologist interested in science, knowledge production, mountain landscapes and mountain cultures. She has a BSc in primate behavioural ecology, a MA in medical anthropology and a PhD in socio-cultural anthropology. As part of the Mountain Legacy Project, her research is focused on how people come to know mountain landscapes, monitor changes, and generate and share new knowledges. Sarah’s research draws on a broad social scientific literature related to craft, skill, science, ways of knowing, expertise and embodiment. Her past fieldwork experiences include a stint in West Africa studying colobus monkeys, qualitative research on dialysis and renal transplant in central Alberta (MA “Exchanging Life: Managing Uncertainty in the Treatment of End-Stage Renal Disease”), and an ethnographic study of high-performance speed skating (PhD “Chasing Giants: An Ethnography of Developments in Speed Skating”).

Alina Fisher, PhD student

Joined Summer 2019

Alina has a Bachelor's degree in Zoology and did graduate studies in Environmental Biology and Ecology, both at the University of Alberta. After many years working on species at risk and invasive species — an area of conservation with seemingly little public support — Alina wanted to understand the barriers to people’s engagement with scientific information. As a result, in 2017 Alina completed an MA in Professional Communication from Royal Roads University in science communication. Her thesis research was nominated for a Governor General’s Gold Medal. With a strong background in both science and the social sciences, she brings a unique research perspective to the team, and combines her interests in wildlife biology with science communication while working with the Mountain Legacy Project. Alina’s research looks at how wildlife community assemblages change as a result of human landscape use and climate change, and how people's attitudes towards these changes may impact the effectiveness of conservation efforts. Alina is also the Research Manager for the School of Environmental Studies, loves science jokes, and proud mom of her two daughters.

Mary Sanseverino, Research Associate

Mary Sanseverino is a Teaching Professor Emerita in the Department of Computer Science at UVic. In 2010 she was honoured with the University of Victoria’s Harry Hickman Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching and Educational Leadership. In 2003 she received the Faculty of Engineering’s award for teaching excellence. Long interested in the scholarship of teaching and learning at the university level, Mary served for five years as the Associate Director of UVic’s Learning and Teaching Centre (2004–07, 2009–10), and for a year as the Centre’s Acting Director (2010–2011).
A long time mountaineer and photographer, Mary’s other research interests have involved work with computational photography, making her a good fit with The Mountain Legacy Project. She has been associated with the project since 2010, going out into the field in 2012, 2014, 2015, and 2016.

James Tricker, PhD student

Joined Fall 2018

James is interested in understanding the drivers and patterns of rapid ecological change in mountain environments using repeat photography. He holds a Bachelor's degree in History and Geography from Rhodes University in South Africa and a M.Sc. in GIS from the University of Leeds in the UK. His doctoral research will focus on developing new image classification techniques to identify and map "new natures" in the Canadian Rockies using the Mountain Legacy Project image collection.

Sonia Voicescu, PhD student

Joined Fall 2018

Sonia has a Bachelor's degree in Environmental Science and an M.Sc. in Integrated Water Resources Management, both obtained from McGill University in Montreal. After being involved with the federal government for a few years in various projects ranging from environmental noise pollution to policy and regulations, she moved to Victoria in 2016 in order to complete a diploma in Restoration of Natural Systems. She brings an interdisciplinary research perspective to the team, and hopes to combine her knowledge and interest in ecological restoration with elements of environmental history and geography. She is excited to pursue research on novel ecosystems and how to manage landscapes within a changing climate.

Shima Tajarloo, PhD student
Joined Spring 2022

Shima holds a Master's degree in Landscape Architecture and in her previous work has focused on intersections of green-blue infrastructure and restoration of urban river valleys in cities such as Tehran and Paris. She brings an interdisciplinary research perspective to the team and has experience in practice as an architect and landscape architect and is interested in designing from place, finding herself in between design, ecological processes and cultural legacies. Through her doctoral research Shima is exploring synergies between ecological restoration of urban ecosystems and architectural practice emphasizing the significance of regenerative design principles. She is looking into meaningful pathways and visualization tools to narrate the story of place with the use of historical archival data. She is interested in how visualizing change can enhance our understanding of the ecology of place and inform regenerative design. Outside the lab, Shima finds joy in hiking, traveling, urban exploration, and capturing stories through photography.

Emilia Hurd, PhD Student

Joined Fall 2023

Emilia joins the Higgs' lab as a licensed landscape architect and interdisciplinary researcher with more than ten years of experience working in a variety of capacities on landscape issues, at a diversity of scales. Emilia's professional experience as a landscape architect has focused primarily on post-industrial, waterfront, and public realm sites in a range of contexts and scales, working for firms in Vancouver, New York, and most recently Halifax. Emilia earned a Bachelor's degree in Environmental Sciences from UBC and a Masters in Landscape Architecture from the University of Toronto. Emilia has an interest in how stories, legacies, and histories can inform different futures that address the complex roots of social, cultural and ecological degradation, and the important role design can play in understanding landscape change. Through her doctoral research, Emilia is looking at highly altered landscapes - the contaminated, degraded sites and regions resulting from industrial exploitation, extraction, and urbanisation. In her work, Emilia draws from her varied experience in sciences, land-use planning, and landscape architecture, using design as both a problem-solving process, rooted in research, analysis, observation, and to put forward visions for the future. For fun, Emilia enjoys traveling, camping, hiking, cycle touring, drawing and generally being out and about with her partner and toddler.

Rod Davis, Ph.D./Research Associate

Graduated Winter 2016

Rod Davis is a research associate with UVic’s Mountain Legacy Lab. His interests relate to conservation and restoration of mountain ecosystems in British Columbia, with a focus on implications of climate change and resource development on environmental policy and practice. Rod is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the School of Environmental Studies, and retired from the provincial government in 2007 after 35 years working on fish and wildlife conservation, forest and range practices, land use planning, and environmental protection, among other things. He has a PhD from the University of Victoria focused on wildlife conservation, a MSc in climatology from McMaster University, and a BSc (Agr) in soil science from the University of British Columbia.

Kate Fryer, Research assistant

Kate is a Uvic Undergraduate in the school of Environmental Studies. Her academic interest focuses on the role of archival and information studies in restoration. Maintaining much of the present and archival data at the MLP, she has a particular fondness for historic images and their associated metadata (but doesn’t like to pick favourites). When she isn’t attached to a computer, Kate enjoys cycling, photography, and just generally being outside.

Past Team Members

Kristen Walsh, MA/Research Associate

Graduated M.A. 2016

Kristen brings an Anthropology background to Environmental Studies. Her research focused on how wind and its role in larger weather processes is experienced by Fire Lookout Observers who inhabit the Canadian Rocky Mountains. She is particularly curious about the weather’s capacity to engage on practical, sensorial, emotive and creative levels and how this may lend to intuitive ways of knowing. Kristen is a member of the Mountain Legacy Project and very grateful to have gotten out for many a fine season with this wonderful project!

Sarah Wilson, Postdoctoral Fellow

2016-2021

Sarah is a forest geographer with a background in ecology (MSc, BSc) and geography (rural livelihoods and tropical forest restoration, PhD). Hailing from the prairies of Manitoba, she has been fascinated by both tropical forests and mountains since preschool. Since then, she has since worked with community-based forest restoration and conservation enterprises in montane forestsin Andean Ecuador, the Nepalese Himalaya, Costa Rica, and Vermont, and visited many more mountains and forests around the world. She uses a combination of case studies, literature syntheses, and field research to identify ways to promote forest recovery and conservation in rural landscapes while enhancing people’s lives and livelihoods. Recent postdocs at the University of Michigan and with the PARTNERS reforestation network focused on bridging the natural and social sciences to understand and assess the social and ecological outcomes of community forestry and restoration. A recipient of the prestigious L’Oreal Women in Science Mentorship Award, she is also dedicated to environmental and science education in both the fieldand the classroom, and to translating research into action-oriented guidance.
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Maya Frederickson, MSc student

Graduated Spring 2022

Maya has a Bachelor of Environmental and Conservation Sciences with a concentration in land reclamation from the University of Alberta. During her undergrad, she worked in the Northwest Territories on permafrost thaw and its effects on global warming. She grew up in the mountainous central interior of British Columbia and is eager to bring her lifelong love of mountains into her research as a member of the Mountain Legacy Project. Her time at the University of Alberta and in the Canadian Arctic has sparked an interest in exploring interactions between humans and their environment and how this relationship can develop better, more effective restoration plans for degraded ecosystems. To explore these ideas, Maya’s research will examine anthropogenic burning as a traditional land management method in the Canadian Rockies.

Cassandra Buunk, MSc student

Astra Lincoln, MSc student

Graduated Spring 2022

Astra Lincoln is a writer, community organizer, and mountain athlete. In the Fall of 2020, she joined Dr. Eric Higgs' lab, where she is researching novel ecosystems emerging due to glacial recession. Astra's environmental praxis is informed by activist work she's done with Indigenous organizers, groups working for police and prison abolition, and various economic justice movements. Before joining, Astra worked with the Sierra Meadow Partnership to study the potential of restored alpine meadows to sequester greenhouse gases and provide late-summer freshet. She has also spent time as a sponsored mountaineer and bikepacker, and has written mountain literature for publications including Alpinist Magazine and Rock and Ice.

Graduated Summer 2021

Cassandra completed an Environmental Technician Diploma followed by a Graduate Certificate in Ecosystem Restoration at Niagara College. She Completed her Bachelor of Science in Environmental Practice at Royal Roads University in 2018 and brings an interdisciplinary background to the team. Her final research paper looked at the environmental, economic, and social elements of the novel ecosystem concept. Cassandra has traveled and worked in diverse regions of Canada, internationally in Ecuador, Peru, and Australia, and through this developed an appreciation for the many ways in which humans interact and have relationships with the natural world. She is interested in ecological restoration as a practice that addresses the degradation in our world and can help bridge the nature-culture divide.

Quirin Hohendorf, M.Sc.

Graduated Fall 2018

Quirin holds a Bachelor´s degree in Forestry from the Weihenstephan-Triesdorf University in Freising, Germany. After previously completing a five-month internship with the Galiano Conservancy Association, he returned to Galiano Island, working on a forest restoration project on District Lot 63. Quirin is interested in forest ecosystems and how they provide habitat for a vast amount of species. He researched the outcomes of an innovative low-impact restoration method used on the site.

Jemma Green, M.Sc.

Graduated Fall 2018

Jemma completed her undergraduate degree in Natural Resources Conservation at the University of British Columbia and worked for years in the fields of wildlife recovery and habitat restoration before coming to the University of Victoria to pursue her Master’s Degree. Jemma explored the potential of restored, enhanced, and novel urban ecosystems to contribute to biodiversity conservation and support species persistence in the face of rapid global change and extinction crises. Determined to learn how urban communities can co-exist with even the most vulnerable species, her research investigated the patterns of occurrence of native frog species in unconventional urban and peri-urban aquatic ecosystems on southeastern Vancouver Island. Jemma was co-supervised by Dr. Purnima Govindarajulu of the Ministry of Environment.

Julie Fortin, M.Sc.

Graduated Spring 2018

Julie completed her undergraduate degree in Earth System Science at McGill University and completed her Master's as part of the Mountain Legacy Project. She explored the use of oblique imagery as a source of landscape composition information in species-habitat models. She used the MLP’s repeat photography to study changes in the landscape of the Willmore Wilderness Park in Alberta over the last century. She then paired that information with species-habitat models to understand how biodiversity has changed in the park over that time.

Hyeone Park, M.A.

Graduated Fall 2016

Hyeone Park conducted MA research on relationships of food forestry and ecological restoration and developed a monitoring framework for food forestry. Her ambition is in exploring ways to mutually reinforce food forestry and restoration practices in a way that builds a resilient, multifunctional landscape. She holds a diploma in Restoration of Natural Systems. While she was at the school, she helped the Mountain Legacy Project with management of data and photographs and co-initiated an Edible Campus UVic project. With her multidisciplinary background in art, business, and natural science, she previously worked for a UNDP Wetland Conservation Project and the Marine Protected Area Centre in South Korea before moving to Canada. Last but not least, she is an avid Latin dancer and traveler.

Tanya Taggart-Hodge, M.Sc.

Graduated Fall 2016

An involvement in interdisciplinary science and interest in the connections between people and their natural environment has led Tanya to various corners of the planet, from the Arctic and Antarctic to the Tropics. She has worked on climate change policy (Yukon Government, 2010), women’s economic rights (Bolivia 2011), marine protected area management and conservation challenges (Panama 2012), novel financing mechanisms and business solutions for environmental challenges (London, UK 2012), scientific photography and mountain research (Canadian Rockies 2014), and historical ecology and archeology (Galapagos Islands 2015). Tanya’s Master's research focused on measuring land cover changes over the past century in the Bow watershed of Alberta comparing historical oblique images with their modern repeats, while looking at flooding implications.

Heike Lettrari, M.A.

Graduated Spring 2017

The mountain pine beetle outbreak of the past fifteen years has been quite unlike historical outbreaks. Exacerbated by climate, this outbreak has seen the beetle's population numbers swell into the trillions, enabling a range of expansion in altitude, whereby the beetles attached trees higher up mountains; geographically, from British Columbia, into Alberta, Saskatchewan, and the boreal forest; and latitudinally, where the beetle attached further north into the Northwest Territories. How does an ecological perturbation of this size disrupt the worldviews and practice of scientists researching this beetle and these landscapes? What do our scientific experts make of such en event? What changes when the mountain pine beetle trigger novel ecosystems that require non-traditional engagement responses? These are questions Heike pursued in her thesis work.