Biodiversity research at the Redpath Museum: field vehicle.

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Biodiversity provides innumerable current and potential future benefits to Canadians. Understanding the origins, distribution, and maintenance of biodiversity is therefore key to understanding those benefits and how best to preserve them for the future. For these reasons, it is also critical to understand the causes of biodiversity loss, including climate change and invasive species, and its consequences for ecosystems. Biodiversity is a property of the natural environment and so must be studied through extensive field work - and this work requires vehicles capable of carrying equipment and personnel on short-to-long excursions. The field vehicle requested here will perform this role for researchers in the Redpath Museum of McGill University. Research will be conducted along several major lines. Professor Hendry will examine how adaptation of threespine stickleback fish to different environments alters ecological processes, such as population sizes and the structure of aquatic communities. Professor Ricciardi will examine how invasive species in the St. Lawrence River have replaced native species - and how these interactions depend on physical conditions, such as water chemistry. Professor Larsson will study past changes in biodiversity through paleontological studies of the last great biodiversity upheaval: the end-Cretaceous mass extinction that killed off nearly half of all life on the planet 65 million years ago. Professor Millien will study how climate change in Quebec will influence the distribution of small mammals and their evolutionary responses. Professor Green will study the distribution and maintenance of biological diversity by focussing on the dynamics of species ranges in amphibians.