Ella Bowles

Canadian Wildlife Service · Environment and Climate Change Canada

Introduction For decades, herbicide application in commercial forestry has been a serious concern for First Nations across northern Ontario. To date, the vast majority of studies concerning the impacts of glyphosate-based herbicides have been conducted through a Western scientific lens. Indigenous knowledge systems provide holistic frameworks which...

Western-trained, non-Indigenous researchers in Canada have an ethical responsibility to collaborate with Indigenous Peoples and to re-envision the scientific research process through the lens of reconciliation. The health of the natural environment has long been a concern to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Peoples, and weaving different ways of...

Natural resources in northern regions are often data-limited because they are difficult and expensive to access. Indigenous ecological knowledge (IEK) can provide information similar to, different from, or complementary to Western scientific data (WSD). We evaluated the general hypothesis that congruence in outcomes of IEK and WSD for population mo...

Climate change disproportionately affects Indigenous Peoples because of strong connections between environmental, cultural, and spiritual well-being. While much of the global discourse surrounding climate change is founded in Western science, the holistic, place-based knowledge of Indigenous Peoples offers a complementary way of understanding and m...

Although a diversity of approaches to wildlife management persists in Canada and the United States of America, the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation (NAM) is a prevailing model for state, provincial, and federal agencies. The success of the NAM is both celebrated and refuted amongst scholars, with most arguing that a more holistic appro...

Human activities and development have contributed to declines in biodiversity across the globe. Understanding and addressing biodiversity loss will require the mobilization of diverse knowledge systems. While calls for interdisciplinary practices in environmental research date back decades, there has been a more recent push for weaving multiple kno...

Investigating whether changes within fish populations may result from harvesting requires a comprehensive approach, especially in more data‐sparse northern regions. Our study took a three‐pronged approach to investigate walleye population change by combining Indigenous knowledge (IK), phenotypic traits, and genomics. We thank Larson et al. (2020) f...

The extent and rate of harvest‐induced genetic changes in natural populations may impact population productivity, recovery and persistence. While there is substantial evidence for phenotypic changes in harvested fishes, knowledge of genetic change in the wild remains limited, as phenotypic and genetic data are seldom considered in tandem, and the n...

Little empirical work in nature has quantified how wild populations with varying effective population sizes and genetic diversity perform when exposed to a gradient of ecologically important environmental conditions. To achieve this, juvenile brook trout from 12 isolated populations or closed metapopulations that differ substantially in population...

The extent and rate of harvest-induced genetic changes in natural populations may impact population productivity, recovery and persistence. While there is substantial evidence for phenotypic changes in harvested fishes, knowledge of genetic change in the wild remains limited, as phenotypic and genetic data are seldom considered in tandem, and the n...

Background: Populations that have repeatedly colonized novel environments are useful for studying the role of ecology in adaptive divergence - particularly if some individuals persist in the ancestral habitat. Such "contemporary ancestors" can be used to demonstrate the effects of selection by comparing phenotypic and genetic divergence between th...

Walleye (Sander vitreus) are in demand as a commercially and recreationally harvested freshwater fish in Canada. Managed populations may exhibit different phenotypic and genetic signatures from their natural counterparts. In Alberta, Canada, this fishery is recovering from population collapses attributed to intensive recreational angling. We hypoth...

Coastal marine Gasterosteus aculeatus were captured from seven locations along the Pacific coast of North America, ranging across 21·8° latitude to test Jordan's rule, i.e. that vertebral number should increase with increasing latitude for related populations of fish. Vertebral number significantly increased with increasing latitude for both total...

The threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus L., 1758) is a vertebrate model for the study of the relationship between phenotype and environment in facilitating rapid evolutionary change. Using four populations from a system of lakes in Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska, and microcomputed tomography and three-dimensional geometric mor...

Body size is a highly variable trait among geographically separated populations. Size-assortative reproductive isolation has been linked to recent adaptive radiations of threespine stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) into freshwater, but the genetic basis of the commonly found size difference between anadromous and derived lacustrine sticklebacks...

Dietary information is critical for assessing the population status of seals, sea lions and walruses—and is determined for most species of pinnipeds using non-invasive methods. However, diets of walruses continue to be described from the stomach contents of dead individuals. Our goal was to assess whether DNA could be extracted from the faeces of P...

The quest for the origin of species has entered the genomics era. Despite decades of evidence confirming the role of the environment in ecological speciation, an understanding of the genomics of ecological speciation is still in its infancy. In this review, we explore the role of genomic architecture in ecological speciation in postglacial fishes....

Reconstructing the diets of pinnipeds by visually identifying prey remains recovered in faecal samples is challenging because of differences in digestion and passage rates of hard parts. Analysing the soft-matrix of faecal material using DNA-based techniques is an alternative means to identify prey species consumed, but published techniques are lar...

Loss of both RB1 alleles is rate limiting for development of retinoblastoma (RB), but genomic copy number gain or loss may impact oncogene(s) and tumor suppressor genes, facilitating tumor progression. We used quantitative multiplex polymerase chain reaction to profile "hot spot" genomic copy number changes for gain at 1q32.1, 6p22, and MYCN, and l...

Retinoblastoma is initiated by loss of both RB1 alleles. Previous studies have shown that retinoblastoma tumors also show further genomic gains and losses. We now define a 2.62 Mbp minimal region of genomic loss of chromosome 16q22, which is likely to contain tumor suppressor gene(s), in 76 retinoblastoma tumors, using loss of heterozygosity (30 of...