Faculty of Arts & Science

University of Lethbridge researchers have been monitoring plant life in Waterton Lakes National Park to see how they’re responding following the massive Kenow wildfire in 2017.

“We know we have increasing fires on the landscape recently, so plant communities are going to have to deal with that,” says Dr. Jenny McCune, a ULethbridge biology professor. “But then we also have increases in human-caused stressors like recreation. There’s a real question about how those two different sources of stress will interact and whether one will magnify the effects of the other.

In the second and third growing seasons after the fire, McCune and her students examined both burned and unburned plots that were originally surveyed in the mid-1990s to compare the plant species present. They wanted to know how plant life is being affected by stressors like wildfire and increased human presence.

In a groundbreaking collaboration, Dr. Robert Sutherland (Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience), alongside Dr. Joyce Van Donkersgoed (Dr. Joyce Van Donkersgoed Inc.), Dr. Karen Schwartkopf-Genswein (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada), Dr. Majid Mohajerani (Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience), Hardeep S. Ryait (Postdoctoral Fellow - CCBN), and Paula Olivares Guzman (Postdoctoral Fellow - CCBN), have embarked on a transformative research project aimed at revolutionizing the management of lameness in beef cattle.

Inland waters including ponds and wetlands are one of the largest natural sources of methane. Pound for pound, methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Now, a University of Lethbridge-led study has found that many of the ponds and wetlands dotting the Canadian Prairies emit less methane than predicted in part due to their elevated salt content, making previous estimates highly inaccurate.

“We came up with new prairie-specific models and estimates that were much lower than expected based on models developed in other parts of the world,” says Dr. Matthew Bogard, a ULethbridge biology professor and Canada Research Chair in Aquatic Environments. “We were very conservative in our calculations and even so, we found that emissions were drastically overestimated.

Their study was recently published in Nature Communications.

A deeper analysis of a decade’s worth of data from Dr. Paul Vasey’s Comparative Sexology Lab at the University of Lethbridge has lent clarity about the influence of two separate but linked literatures on biological variables influencing male homosexuality.

Vasey, a Professor and Board of Governors Research Chair, and his team of former students (Drs. Doug VanderLaan, Scott Semenyna and Francisco Goméz Jiménez) wanted to determine if there was evidence for both the Fraternal Birth Order Effect (FBOE) and the Female Fecundity Effect (FFE) in data they collected over a decade while working in Samoa.