
Lisa VenierNatural Resources Canada; Sault Ste Marie Ontario
Lisa Venier
Doctor of Philosophy
About
133
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Introduction
Lisa Venier has been a research scientist with Canadian Forest Service, Natural Resources Canada since September 1996. She completed her PhD in Landscape Ecology at Carleton University in 1996 and then moved to Sault Ste Marie to work at the Great Lakes Forest Research Centre. Her research interests are focused on what biodiversity can tell us about sustainable forest management and other disturbances. She has worked at a broad range of scales including stand, landscape and regional levels and o
Publications
Publications (133)
The study of microbial communities of the plant phyllosphere in remote locations using DNA-based approaches is limited by the challenges associated with their preservation in the field and during transportation. Freezing is a common DNA preservation strategy, but it may be unsuitable for leaf samples, or inaccessible in some locations. Other method...
Understanding the impacts of harvest and subsequent silviculture practices at stand scales on the below-ground biota, and their associated nutrient cycling processes, is needed to more fully evaluate the sustainable management of boreal forest systems. While stand replacing wildfire is the primary natural disturbance mechanism in jack pine-dominate...
The border between Canada and the United States poses jurisdictional challenges when it comes to consistently implementing science-based conservation of forests and their biological communities. Through a partnership with the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, Boreal Avian Modelling Project, and American Bird Conservancy, we developed a co-production...
Defoliation by eastern spruce budworm is one of the most important natural disturbances in Canadian boreal and hemi‐boreal forests with annual area affected surpassing that of fire and harvest combined, and its impacts are projected to increase in frequency, severity, and range under future climate scenarios. Deciding on an active management strate...
The soil supports many ecosystem services (ES) essential to human well‐being. Rapid developments in digital soil mapping (DSM) allow the mapping of soil types and soil properties with improved resolution and accuracy. However, the potential of DSM to improve the assessment and mapping of ES is not fully exploited. To better understand this potentia...
There is increasing concern across Canada regarding the use of chemical herbicides in forestry. In Quebec, the use of herbicides for forest management on public lands has been discontinued since 2001, and there is mounting pressure to eliminate or greatly reduce their use in Ontario. To this end, we present a digital compendium of studies that asse...
The assessment of cumulative effects (CEs) in the context of a regional assessment (RA), is a complex scientific and management activity. It requires interdisciplinary knowledge, purposefully designed and integrative science-policy interactions as well as effective planning guided by structured decision making. Currently, there are no commonly agre...
Information about post-disturbance regeneration success and successional dynamics is critical to predict forest ecosystem resistance and resilience to disturbances and climate change. Our objective was to identify and classify post-disturbance empirical research conducted by the Canadian Forest Service (CFS) of Natural Resources Canada and their co...
Fungi are primary agents of coarse woody debris (CWD) decay in boreal forests, playing an essential role in nutrient cycling and carbon storage. We compared fungal community assemblages using alpha and beta diversity metrics, and physical and chemical properties of CWD across three tree species (trembling aspen [Populus tremuloides], black spruce [...
Forest biomass harvest has the potential to provide feedstocks for energy production to offset fossil fuel consumption. However, concerns have been raised regarding the ecological sustainability of removing additional biomass from forests, in particular the impacts on biodiversity. In this paper, we used a suite of ground-dwelling arthropod taxa (g...
Wildfire is a natural disturbance in boreal forest systems that has been predicted to increase in frequency, intensity, and extent due to climate change. Most studies tend to assess the recovery of one component of the community at a time but here we use DNA metabarcoding to simultaneously monitor soil bacteria, fungi, and arthropods along an 85-ye...
The market for forest products has diversified to include biomass energy products sourced from materials that were typically left on-site after harvest. In this study we examined whether intensified biomass removal following harvest will effect site soil biological diversity and metabolic functioning, and how decisions surrounding sampling, in site...
Wildfire is a natural disturbance in boreal forest systems that has been predicted to increase in frequency, intensity, and extent due to climate change. Most studies that use conventional methods tend to assess the recovery of one component of the community at a time but here we use DNA metabarcoding to simultaneously monitor soil bacteria, fungi,...
There is interest in utilizing wood ash as an amendment in forestry operations as a mechanism to return nutrients to soils that are removed during harvesting, with the added benefit of diverting this bioenergy waste material from landfill sites. Existing studies have not arrived at a consensus on what the effects of wood ash amendments are on soil...
In Canada, the combustion of forest biomass for bioenergy production has been increasing with an associated increase in residual wood ash. Wood ash is typically landfilled as waste but there is growing interest in applying wood ash to the soils of commercial forests. Ideally, wood ash supplies nutrients that may have been removed through biomass ha...
Fungi are primary agents of coarse woody debris (CWD) decay in forests, playing an essential role in nutrient cycling and carbon storage. Characterizing fungal communities within CWD will promote further understanding of the fungal controls on CWD decomposition. We compared fungal community assemblages using alpha and beta diversity metrics, carbon...
Direct and indirect effects of habitat modification and changes in biotic interactions should be taken into consideration to understand the ecological consequences of forest anthropogenic disturbance on forest ecosystems. Few empirical studies assess indirect effects and consider multiple trophic levels, but recent statistical and theoretical advan...
The impact of avian predation on a declining population of the spruce budworm, Choristoneura fumifereana (Clem.), was measured using single-tree exclosure cages in a mature stand of balsam fir, Abies balsamea (L.), and white spruce, Picea glauca (Moench.) Voss. Bird population censuses and observations of foraging and nest-feeding activity were als...
Traditionally, forest management has focused on forestry-related practices whereas other industries have been managed separately. Forest management requires the integration of all natural resource development activities, along with other anthropogenic and natural forest disturbances (e.g., climate change, pollution, wildfire, pest disturbance) to u...
Increased demand for timber, the reduction in the available timber resources, and more frequent and severe forest fires under a changing climate have increased the use of salvage logging in North American forests despite concerns regarding impacts on biodiversity and long-term forest productivity. We aimed to complement previous approaches that use...
Growing pressures linked to global warming are prompting governments to put policies in place to find alternatives to fossil fuels. In this study, we compared the impact of tree-length harvesting to more intensive full-tree harvesting on the composition of fungi residing in residual stumps 5 years after harvest. In the tree-length treatment, a larg...
Wood ash amendment to forest soils contributes to the sustainability of the growing bioenergy industry, not only through decreased wood ash waste disposal in landfills, but also by increasing soil/site productivity and tree growth. However, tree growth studies to date have reported variable responses to wood ash, highlighting the need to identify p...
Terrestrial arthropod fauna have been suggested as a key indicator of ecological integrity in forest systems. Because phenotypic identification is expert-limited, a shift towards DNA metabarcoding could improve scalability and democratize the use of forest floor arthropods for biomonitoring applications. The objective of this study was to establish...
Transformative advances in metagenomics are providing an unprecedented ability to characterize the enormous diversity of microorganisms and invertebrates sustaining soil health and water quality. These advances are enabling a better recognition of the ecological linkages between soil and water, and the biodiversity exchanges between these two reser...
Forest understory vegetation is an important characteristic of the forest. Predicting and mapping understory is a critical need for forest management and conservation planning, but it has proved difficult with available methods to date. LiDAR has the potential to generate remotely sensed forest understory structure data, but this potential has yet...
Substantial effort has been dedicated to developing reliable monitoring schemes for North American bird populations, but our ability to monitor bird populations in the boreal forest remains limited because of the sparsity of long-term data sets, particularly in northerly regions. Given the importance of the boreal forest for many migratory birds, w...
Forest understory vegetation is an important feature of wildlife habitat among other things. Predicting and mapping understory is a critical need for forest management and conservation planning, but it has proved difficult. LiDAR has the potential to generate remotely sensed forest understory structure data, yet this potential has to be fully valid...
Terrestrial arthropod fauna have been suggested as a key indicator of ecological integrity in forest systems. Because phenotypic identification is expert-limited, a shift towards DNA metabarcoding could improve scalability and democratize the use of forest floor arthropods for biomonitoring applications. The objective of this study was to establish...
Core Ideas
Bioenergy is growing; the ash generated as a by‐product is often treated as waste.
Ash applications could be used to emulate wildfire effects on forest soil chemistry.
Wildfires and ash applications increase soil phosphorus and calcium and raise pH.
Guidance on ash dosage rates and pre‐treatment for emulating wildfire is required.
As ef...
Land-use intensification can lead to taxonomic and/or functional homogenization of biotic communities, with potential consequences for ecosystem functioning. In boreal forests, managers are increasingly considering intensifying woody biomass removal for bioenergy, but associated functional effects on soil fauna that use microhabitats associated wit...
AshNet is a network of Canadian government, academic, and industry researchers, foresters and policy makers investigating the potential beneficial diversion of wood ash, a by-product of the growing bioenergy industry, from landfills across Canada to forest soils. AshNet currently consists of 14 wood ash application experiments established at sites...
AshNet est un réseau de représentants du gouvernement du Canada, d’universitaires, de chercheurs de l’industrie, de forestiers et de décideurs politiques qui étudient les avantages potentiels d’utiliser les cendres de bois, issue de l’industrie grandissante de la bioénergie et normalement envoyée dans les centres d’enfouissement au Canada, pour ame...
The Canadian boreal zone provides ecosystem services from local to global scales. Either directly or indirectly, demands for these services have and will continue to serve as drivers of change in the region. Here we present evidence for past, present, and potential future demand for maintaining nonprovisioning ecosystem services (NPrES), defined as...
Loss of global forest, and in particular forest that has little human disturbance, is a standard against which we measure progress to conserve Earth’s forests. The value of intact forest landscapes has taken hold in the global psyche. We provide a brief history of the intact forest landscape concept and discuss how this has moved to an operational...
Insect outbreaks are major natural disturbance events that affect communities of forest birds, either directly by affecting the food supply or indirectly by changing the vegetation composition of forest canopies. An examination of correlations between measures of bird and insect abundance across different spatial scales and over varying time lag ef...
The Staphylinidae, or rove beetles, is one of the largest and most biologically diverse of the beetle families. The world fauna consists of more than 63,495 described species, with more than 1774 species recorded in Canada. By virtue of their sheer abundance, number of species and trophic diversity, rove beetles play important roles in terrestrial...
A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has not been fixed in the paper.
In North American boreal forests, woody biomass is increasingly becoming an attractive bioenergy feedstock as it represents a more renewable, and low carbon alternative to fossil fuel. However, concerns over the ecological sustainability of an intensification of biomass harvesting over the long term remain. We assessed the effects of a gradient of...
The contribution of forest biomass to Canada’s energy production is small but growing. As the forest bioenergy industry in Canada expands, there is growing interest in more sustainably managing the wood ash that is generated as a by-product. Despite being rich in nutrients, wood ash is usually landfilled in Canada. Soil applications of ash in Canad...
The boreal zone is at risk of cumulative effects of natural resource extraction activities, which may be further exacerbated in the face of climate change. A major challenge is the lack of common approaches to assess the effectiveness of management measures (e.g., acts, regulations, standards, guidelines, best management practices and certification...
Automated recording units are increasingly being used to sample wildlife populations. These devices can produce large amounts of data that are difficult to process manually. However, the information in the recordings can be summarized with semiautomated sound recognition software. Our objective was to assess the utility of the semiautomated bird so...
Woody biomass is increasingly harvested in Canadian boreal forests as a source of bioenergy. However, there is concern over the environmental sustainability of harvesting practices. Our study assessed how forest floor mesofauna communities responded to an increasing intensity gradient of biomass removal and soil disturbance in a jack pine (Pinus ba...
Cost-effective, ecologically relevant, sensitive, and standardized indicators are requisites of biomonitoring. DNA metabarcoding of macroinvertebrate communities is a potentially transformative biomonitoring technique that can reduce cost and time constraints while providing information-rich, high resolution taxonomic data for the assessment of wat...
We tested the response of species composition of three dominant litter-dwelling arthropod taxa (carabid beetles, spiders, and rove beetles) to wildfire and harvest. This study was conducted in north-central Ontario (47°42′N, 83°36′W) in jack pine (Pinus banksiana Lamb.) dominated stands in 2013 using pitfall trapping. Using 222 species (12 015 indi...
Forested buffer strips are typically prescribed around water bodies during forest harvesting operations to minimize effects on aquatic communities and to maintain fish and wildlife habitat. It has been argued that the systematic application of these buffer strips in the boreal forest results in the creation of an unnatural distribution of linear pa...
The growing demand for bioenergy has raised concerns about the sustainability of intensive forest biomass removal. Less attention has been paid to the ash generated when forest biomass is combusted to produce energy. In Canada, this ash is often landfilled, but in some countries, wood ash is applied to the soil to maintain or improve soil fertility...
This note summarizes the results to date from the Island Lake Biomass Harvest Experiment, a collaborative research project situated near Chapleau, Ontario. The site, a 40 year old second growth forest, was established in the winter of 2010-2011 to assess the impacts of various levels of biomass removal on boreal forest biodiversity, soil properties...
Cette note récapitule l’ensemble des résultats obtenus jusqu’à présent dans le cadre de l’expérience de récolte de la biomasse forestière d’Island Lake, un projet de recherche collaboratif situé près de Chapleau, en Ontario. Le site de recherche a été établi dans une forêt de seconde venue âgée de 40 ans au cours de l’hiver 2010-2011 afin de mesure...
Au Canada, les cendres générées au cours de la production de bioénergie à partir de résidus ligneux sont généralement considérées comme des déchets et sont enfouies. Cependant, la cendre de bois est riche en calcium, en magnésium, en potassium et en phosphore. Ainsi, les aménagistes forestiers de quelques pays européens sont fortement encouragés à...
In Canada, the ash generated during bioenergy production from woody residues is generally treated as a waste material and landfilled. However, wood ash is rich in calcium, magnesium, potassium and phosphorus. As a consequence, forest managers in some European countries are actively encouraged to use wood ash as a soil amendment to replace the nutri...