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Laura J. Pollock

Associate Academic Member
laura.pollock@mila.quebec
Assistant Professor, McGill University
Research Topics
Computational Biology
Probabilistic Models

Biography

I am an assistant professor of conservation, ecology, evolution and behaviour in the Biology Department at McGill University.

As a quantitative ecologist, I am interested in large-scale patterns of biodiversity at regional, continental or global scales. My research focuses on the effects of climate change on biodiversity, which combines many biodiversity data inputs with predictive models. The second part of my research is focused on optimizations for identifying key biodiversity areas and efficient conservation solutions.

Publications

Conserving avian evolutionary history can effectively safeguard future benefits for people
Rikki Gumbs
Claudia L. Gray
Michael Hoffmann
Rafael Molina-Venegas
Nisha Owen
Laura J. Pollock
Phylogenetic diversity (PD)—the evolutionary history of a set of species—is conceptually linked to the maintenance of yet-to-be-discover… (see more)ed benefits from biodiversity or “option value.” We used global phylogenetic and utilization data for birds to test the PD option value link, under the assumption that the performance of sets of PD-maximizing species at capturing known benefits is analogous to selecting the same species at a point in human history before these benefits were realized. PD performed better than random at capturing utilized bird species across 60% of tests, with performance linked to the phylogenetic dispersion and prevalence of each utilization category. Prioritizing threatened species for conservation by the PD they encapsulate performs comparably to prioritizing by their functional distinctiveness. However, species selected by each metric show low overlap, indicating that we should conserve both components of biodiversity to effectively conserve a variety of uses. Our findings provide empirical support for the link between evolutionary history and benefits for future generations.
2023-09-19
Science Advances (published)
doi.org
Addressing uncertainty when projecting marine species' distributions under climate change
Sarah C. Davies
Patrick L. Thompson
Catalina Gomez
Jessica Nephin
Anders Knudby
Ashley E. Park
Sarah K. Friesen
Laura J. Pollock
Emily M. Rubidge
Sean C. Anderson
Josephine C. Iacarella
Devin A. Lyons
Andrew MacDonald
Andrew McMillan
Eric J. Ward
Amber M. Holdsworth
Neil Swart
Jeff Price
Karen L. Hunter
2023-09-12
Ecography (published)
doi.org
Trophic interaction models predict interactions across space, not food webs.
Dominique Caron
Ulrich Brose
Miguel Lurgi
F. Guillaume Blanchet
Dominique Gravel
Laura J. Pollock
Aim: Trophic interactions are central to our understanding of essential ecosystem functions as well as their stability. Predicting these int… (see more)eractions has become increasingly common due to the lack of empirical data on trophic interactions for most taxa in most ecosystems. We aim to determine how far and accurately trophic interaction models extrapolate to new communities both in terms of pairwise predator-prey interactions and higher level food web attributes (i.e., species position, food web-level properties).
2022-12-31
(published)
www.semanticscholar.org