April 7, 2025 • 47 mins
The forest canopy above us holds secrets most people never notice—miniature ecosystems thriving on tree trunks that tell profound stories about our changing world. In this eye-opening conversation with Dr. Yolanda Wiersma, professor of biology at Memorial University in Newfoundland, we venture into the fascinating realm of landscape ecology and lichen biodiversity.
Dr. Wiersma introduces us to landscape ecology—a discipline studying interactions between living things and their environments at scales visible from airplane windows. From the rolling hills and forests to human developments cutting across them, these patterns shape everything living beneath the canopy. Her work bridges traditional scientific approaches with Indigenous knowledge, leading to remarkable discoveries in unexpected places.
The heart of our discussion revolves around lichens—organisms far more complex than most realize. These aren't single lifeforms but miniaturized ecosystems combining fungi, algae, and sometimes bacteria from three different kingdoms. Dr. Wiersma's passion shines as she describes how these slow-growing organisms "eat the air" through photosynthesis while producing hundreds of unique chemical compounds, some with antimicrobial properties so effective that birds line their nests with them to protect vulnerable chicks.
Perhaps most surprising is Dr. Wiersma's discovery of a lichen biodiversity hotspot in central Newfoundland—an area previously overlooked by scientists until a member of the Qalipu First Nation reached out with photographs of rare specimens. This collaboration led to documenting 175 species in a region not previously known for lichen diversity, highlighting how traditional knowledge enriches scientific understanding.
Whether you're a nature enthusiast, someone curious about the hidden workings of our forest ecosystems, or simply appreciate learning about overlooked wonders in our natural world, this conversation will transform how you see the trees around you. Listen now to discover the miniature worlds thriving silently above our heads and what they can teach us about our changing planet.
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Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
How did a small-town sheet metal mechanic come to
build one of Canada's mosticonic fishing lodges?
I'm your host, steve Nitzwicky,and you'll find out about that
and a whole lot more on theOutdoor Journal Radio Network's
newest podcast, diaries of aLodge Owner.
But this podcast will be morethan that.
Every week on Diaries of aLodge Owner, I'm going to
(00:25):
introduce you to a ton of greatpeople, share their stories of
our trials, tribulations andinspirations, learn and have
plenty of laughs along the way.
Meanwhile we're sitting therebobbing along trying to figure
out how to catch a bass and weboth decided one day we were
going to be on television doinga fishing show.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
My hands get sore a little bit when I'm reeling in
all those bass in the summertime, but that's might be for more
fishing than it was punching youso confidently.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
you said, hey, pat have you ever eaten a drum?
Find Diaries of a Lodge Ownernow on Spotify, apple Podcasts
or wherever you get your podcast.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
As the world gets louder and louder, the lessons
of our natural world becomeharder and harder to hear, but
they are still available tothose who know where to listen.
But they are still available tothose who know where to listen.
I'm Jerry Ouellette and I washonoured to serve as Ontario's
Minister of Natural Resources.
However, my journey into thewoods didn't come from politics.
(01:34):
Rather, it came from my time inthe bush and a mushroom.
In 2015, I was introduced tothe birch-hungry fungus known as
chaga, a tree conch withcenturies of medicinal
applications used by Indigenouspeoples all over the globe.
After nearly a decade ofharvest, use, testimonials and
(02:02):
research, my skepticism hasfaded to obsession and I now
spend my life dedicated toimproving the lives of others
through natural means.
But that's not what the show isabout.
My pursuit of this strangemushroom and my passion for the
outdoors has brought me to theplaces and around the people
that are shaped by our naturalworld.
On Outdoor Journal Radio'sUnder the Canopy podcast, I'm
(02:22):
going to take you along with meto see the places, meet the
people that will help you findyour outdoor passion and help
you live a life close to natureand under the canopy.
So join me today for anothergreat episode and hopefully we
can inspire a few more people tolive their lives under the
canopy people to live theirlives under the canopy Well, as
(02:53):
always.
We want to thank all ourlisteners around Canada, around
the world, in Switzerland andGhana, trinidad and Tobago and
the States, of course, and youknow it was an interesting
morning.
It's that time of year where thesap is still kind of sort of
running and we're out doing aboil.
So I was out this morning doingthe maple syrup activities,
making sure everything's goingfine for our special blend which
(03:14):
we make available at shows andthings like that.
It's called Chaga Maple and ofcourse, my chocolate lab Ensign
Gunner looks up at me like comeon, dad, what's going on?
Are we going for our walk?
Are we doing our morning run?
Well, on maple syrup time, heusually gets out in the bush
with me so he gets lots of timelater on, but it looks like it's
closing down very shortly andwe should be moving forward with
(03:38):
the finish of the maple syrupseason, cleaning up all the pans
and all the buckets and thelids, and all that because we
still use an old system.
We got about 150, 200 taps whenwe're all fully operational,
but it's going well.
And anyways, this morning we'vegot a special guest, yolanda
Wiersma.
Welcome to the program, yolanda.
Speaker 4 (03:57):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Well, that's good.
And, yolanda, maybe tell us abit about yourself First of all.
Whereabouts are you located, soour international guests can
kind of figure out where you'recontacting us from.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
Yeah, for sure.
I am in the province ofNewfoundland and Labrador, on
the island of Newfoundland, inthe city of St John's.
So if you picture a map ofNorth America and you look for
that big island to thenortheastern part of Canada, st
John's is on the easternmostedge of that big island.
So I am as far east as you canget in North America.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Yeah, it was interesting.
I have to tell you that when mywife and I celebrated our 25th
wedding anniversary I said toher I said where do you want to
go?
She said I want to go toNewfoundland.
You know something?
Their marketing and promotionmust be doing wonders because,
sure enough, for our 25thanniversary we went to
Newfoundland in May and rented avehicle and drove up all along
(04:53):
the eastern shore and all thedifferent communities right up
past Gander and all the way upquite a bit up, and I found it
very, very interesting.
And the one thing I found veryinteresting about
Newfoundlanders was a lot ofthem know exactly where or had
relatives or friends that workedin Oshawa, predominantly at the
General Motors automotive planthere or one of the feeder
(05:13):
plants, and they seem to have agood sense of it.
But it was a great province ofpeople are extremely friendly,
hardworking and dedicatedindividuals and we very much
appreciated the time that we didspend in Newfoundland.
Yeah, awesome.
Yeah, it's a great place to live.
Yeah, it is well.
I don't know how's the winterbeen you still, you got snow
there in st john's, or you know.
Speaker 4 (05:34):
I don't think so we had a very uh, snow-free winter,
uh, which is sad because I'm aI'm a big fan of winter, I'm a
nordic skier and it was kind ofa sad winter to be a skier.
But our wintersters are reallyvariable.
In the almost 20 years I'velived here, we've had winters
where snow's on the ground inDecember and doesn't leave until
April, and I've even skied aslate as May long weekend once.
(05:57):
And then we have winters wheremaybe there's only five or six
weekends with snow on the groundand it's mostly falling as rain
.
So it's it's very variable, butthe winters here are
comparatively mild compared tocentral Canada.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Yeah, the snow depth, I understand, can be quite a
bit once the hard winters hit.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
Yes, it can be.
Yes, oh yes, we've had, we'vehad some pretty pretty good
storms with a lot of snow.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
Well, when we were there and I'm noticing a friend,
I don't know if you know I'mnoticing a friend, I don't know
if you know we've been there 20years.
I don't know if you know SteveKent.
He was a provincial member that, just out Mount Royal, I think
it was was his riding.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
Oh yeah, so name rings a bell.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
Yeah, just there.
So I went into the legislature,which I found very interesting
because Newfoundland is the onlylegislature in the province or
in Canada, of all thelegislatures, where the
governing body sits to the leftof the speaker.
Everybody else sits to theright.
And so I went in and I was inthe chambers.
(06:59):
We were in the chambers whenthe session was on and found it
very interesting that thegoverning body was sitting on
the left-hand side of thespeaker and they told me they
said well, what happened wasthat the heaters broke down one
winter and the only heater wasworking was on the left-hand
side of the speaker.
(07:19):
So they moved the governmentbody to the left-hand side and
they stayed there.
Yeah, it was interesting.
We were there in May when ouranniversary was, and we were
told that well, you know, it'snot a good month to be here,
it's not something that a lot ofpeople would want to come out
in May, but we had no problemsat all and drove up the eastern
(07:41):
coastline and very much enjoyedit.
Speaker 4 (07:43):
Oh great.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Yeah, Now you mentioned you've been in
Newfoundland for 20 years.
Where were you before that?
Speaker 4 (07:54):
I grew up in southern Ontario in the Niagara
Peninsula, and I've lived allover various parts of Ontario,
spent a couple of summers on theNorth Shore of Superior, spent
a lot of time in the GeorgianBay area and lived right in
Toronto for about five years andspent a year in the Northwest
Territories and, yeah, thenended up out here.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
Oh, interesting.
You were in the territories,you were there for a year.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
you said yeah, I actually.
In a previous life I was a highschool teacher and I taught up
there for a year.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Oh, very interesting.
So now you have a position atuniversity, correct?
Speaker 4 (08:24):
That's right, I'm at Memorial University.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
Tell us what you do at Memorial.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
I am a professor in the biology department here, so
my job is a mix of primarilyteaching and research.
So half of my time I'm teachingundergraduates mostly ecology
courses teaching undergraduatesmostly ecology courses and then
the other half of the time I'mdoing either my own research or
(08:50):
I'm supervising graduatestudents.
So in my research group I haveat any given time anywhere
between three and eight or ninegraduate students, so those
would be master's or PhDstudents doing their own
independent research that I'msupervising.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Oh, very interesting.
So just for our listenersgetting an understanding,
because not many know what anecology course is kind of give
us a breakdown of what anecology course is.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
Sure.
So ecology is essentially thestudy of our home.
So eco, actually, the root wordcomes from the Greek word for
home and ology is the study, soit's the study of our natural
home.
And ecologists study theinteractions between living
things and their environments,and they do that in all kinds of
different ways.
They might study it at thelevel of the individual.
(09:34):
So how do individual organismsthat could be plants, animals,
insects, what have you?
How do they adapt to theparticular environment that they
live in?
They can also study populations.
So how do populations ebb andflow through time and what
drives those changes topopulations?
Some ecologists studycommunities, so they might look
(09:56):
at all of the organisms in, say,a pond community or a meadow
community.
And my branch of ecology iscalled landscape ecology.
So I study those interactionsat extremely large spatial, uh
extents, at the scale of entirelandscapes so how large would an
entire landscape be?
Speaker 3 (10:14):
you're referring to somebody's household.
Are you looking at an acre?
10 acres, 100 acres, a thousandacres?
Speaker 4 (10:20):
yeah, that's a great question and I get, I get asked
that all the time.
So, um, it can be to.
It's usually at the extent ofseveral kilometers to tens or
even hundreds of kilometers.
In landscape ecology we like todefine.
People always ask you know well, what do you mean by when you
say a landscape?
And we like to describe it aswhat you can see from an
(10:41):
airplane window.
So if you think about, you know,being on a cross-continental
flight on a cloudless day andyou've got a window seat and
you're looking down, you cantell if you're flying over.
You know flatland or rollinghills or bumpy hills, mountains,
whatever it is, and those arethe land forms.
And you can also see what'scovering the land.
You can see whether it'sforests and you can usually tell
(11:03):
if it's deciduous or coniferousforest.
You don't see the individualtrees, you can't identify the
species, but you can see, youcan discriminate the forest from
the fields and all that.
Those are the land covers.
And then you can also see thehuman land uses.
You can see the roads, you cansee the railways, you can see
the towns, you can see theindustries, you can see where
humans have altered thelandscape for agriculture.
You know where forest harvestis taking place, and those are
(11:25):
the land uses.
And so all three of thosethings combined land cover, land
form and land uses are whatmake up a landscape the way we
understand it in my discipline,and so we look at how those
things interact to theninfluence the species that live
on that landscape and also howthe species might in turn help
shape those patterns.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Very interesting.
So you mentioned, yolanda, thatyou had some students masters
and PhD students that were doingtheir thesis or their papers.
What kind of research do theytypically are they doing in your
classes that you're dealingwith them?
Speaker 4 (12:04):
Yeah, it's over the years it's been kind of lots of
variety, I'd say the sort ofthing that's in common is it's
usually focused here inNewfoundland and usually has
something to do with an appliedproblem related either to
conservation or resourcemanagement.
So I've had students, we do alot of work in the national
(12:25):
parks here in Terranova andGrossmoor National Parks with my
colleagues and my collaboratorsand we've done stuff with the
provincial wildlife divisionlooking at trying to understand
distributions of species ofinterest.
So it's really varied.
But I really like to haveresearch that feeds into some
kind of applied problem andhopefully influences things like
(12:48):
management decisions, policydecisions, that sort of thing.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
Very interesting.
Now you mentioned you do a lotof the parks and they were
looking for management sourcesto try and deal with the
overpopulation so they didn'thave big swings or die-offs in
(13:14):
large numbers.
Did any of your students orhave you worked with any of the
moose population problem thatwas taking place at that time in
Newfoundland?
Speaker 4 (13:23):
Yes, actually we have my colleague, dr Sean LaRue,
and I have a project that we'rejust wrapping up.
That's in the two parks, andit's directly related to sort of
examining the effect of mooseon plant communities, liking
diversity and as well as thebuildup of carbon and nitrogen
in both plants and soils.
(13:44):
And so we've been doing thatproject for a number of years
and we were also takingadvantage of these moose
exclosures that were developedhere, quite actually before my
time, by a now retired colleagueof mine, dr Louise Hermanutes,
in collaboration with both theprovincial government and the
two parks, and these are largefenced areas that keep the moose
(14:06):
out, and so we can sort ofunderstand how the forest would
grow back following adisturbance, in the absence of
moose.
And then we compare that toadjacent areas and we're looking
at a lot of how the forestresponds to different
disturbances, so things likeinsect outbreaks, wind throw,
fires, as well as logging, andthen how the forest grows back
(14:28):
both with and without moose inand out of the parks.
And the parks when you werehere they would have just been
starting to think about actuallyintroducing moose hunting.
So we also have some data, thatsort of traces how the forest
has been changing and then thetwo parks have had some hunting
and it is showing an impact inthat the forest is starting to
(14:51):
come back, with a little bit ofpopulation control on the moose.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Yeah, I know that when I was there, one of the
things that I discussed with theministry responsible for
dealing with those issues inNewfoundland and Labrador was
was that Ontario?
At one point we traded actuallymoose for turkeys with Michigan
and other jurisdictions andthey were quite surprised you
actually traded animals.
I said, yeah, we helicopteredinto Michigan and things like
that and had quick turnoverswhich helped stabilize a lot of
(15:20):
the moose populations in otherjurisdictions.
So they were thinking outsidethe box when we sort of brought
those sort of ideas in, whichwas good to hear.
But now Newfoundland obviouslyis a large island.
Do they get the same sort ofdiseases coming in that would
affect, like the spruce budwormand those sort of things that
(15:41):
come in and actually have animpact on a lot of the forest as
they found in otherjurisdictions?
Or because it's an island, it'snot quite as as hit as hard, or
you get as many of thosediseases coming in, or would you
know?
Speaker 4 (15:54):
um, I'm not an expert on all diseases but in terms of
uh, forest pests, we do havespruce spudworm.
In fact we're just sort of atthe beginning stages of the
spruce spudworm outbreak on theisland right now.
But we also have hemlock.
Looper is another forest insectthat we've got out here.
So we do have ones that youwould find in the eastern boreal
(16:17):
on mainland Canada.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
So now are you familiar with management
practices and how they're tryingto deal with the spruce budworm
and the hemlock looper.
So with the spruce budworm andthe hemlock looper.
Speaker 4 (16:26):
So with the spruce budworm, the province does do
some spraying with BT.
As far as I'm aware, that's themain spray and there's some
controversy around that they'renot spraying in the two national
parks right now.
So from a scientific pointthat's kind of interesting
because you have sort of anatural experiment and again,
(16:49):
doing experiments at a landscapescale is often tricky.
But with the fact that there'ssimilar forests in and outside
of the boundaries of a nationalpark you can assess what the
impact of these outbreaks whichare naturally cycling, and the
boreal forest is adisturbance-driven ecosystem.
(17:09):
It is interesting just to sortof see how that will sort of
play out over time when you cancompare an area where there's
been spraying versus wherethere's not been spraying.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
Yeah, I know spruce budworm has had a significant
impact in a lot of otherjurisdictions and one of the
ways that they dealt with it wasthey allowed the forest
companies to go in and do majorcuts in order to take out the
fiber before it was totallyuseless, which had a huge impact
.
Well, when you look into theecology of the impacts on the
(17:43):
society because all of a suddenthere was huge amounts of fiber
that were available whichdecreased the price of wood
products Canada-wide in ourlocations where sales were done
and I don't know if they lookedat those sort of impacts as well
as potentially increasing theirharvest in order to make sure
that that fiber that has beencontaminated is utilized before
(18:05):
it becomes basically a wastematerial but those are different
ways to look at sort of thingsyeah, definitely, um, you know
forest, for I I not a trainedforester, but a lot of my
research has sort of uh, been inin forest ecology, so I do do a
lot of chatting with forestmanagers, and forest management
(18:28):
is a very complex area to workin.
Speaker 4 (18:33):
You're balancing a lot of social pressures,
economic pressures, ecological,and they're complex ecosystems
too.
So, yeah, it's a very complexand nuanced too.
Oh, absolutely yeah, it's avery complex and nuanced area in
which to work.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
Now, I know we didn't plan on talking about a lot of
the forestry stuff, but theHemlock loop.
Are you familiar with theimpacts that are taking place in
Newfoundland there?
Speaker 4 (19:02):
Not really.
We haven't had an outbreak ofthat one in a long time, so it's
kind of not on anybody's radarat the moment.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
Okay, that's good to hear.
So what research are youyourself working on then,
Yolanda?
Speaker 4 (19:15):
So, in addition to the work in the two parks on
carbon nitrogen in the plantsand the soils, the other work
I'm doing is what I call lichenlandscape ecology.
So I'm taking some of theprinciples of landscape ecology
and using lichens as kind of amodel system to understand
(19:36):
ecological processes acrossdifferent spatial scales.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Well, lichens are.
I think they're predominantlythe main food for caribou
species, is it not?
Speaker 4 (19:47):
Yes, they are.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
And so what is the impact of the lichens on the
caribou populations, or what areyou finding?
Are you finding anyrelationships there with that?
Speaker 4 (20:00):
So lichens are definitely hugely important for
caribou and we do have caribouhere on the island but those
kinds of lichens are not my mainarea of research.
Those are ground lichens, butlichens are actually here a huge
diverse group.
We probably have.
We have probably over 300species or more of lichens here
(20:23):
in the province and I primarilystudy the ones that live on the
trees.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
Okay, so how long does it take tree lichens to
grow?
Speaker 4 (20:33):
That's a great question.
They're slow growing andthey'll grow a few millimeters
at a time, and so they tend to.
But there's variation.
There's some lichens that wecan that sort of get labeled as
weed species.
They might grow a little faster, but there are other lichens
that only grow a few millimetersto a few centimeters a year,
(20:55):
and so they really like to be onolder trees in these older
forests.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Now I did a podcast with Bruce Ranta, who is a
biologist for the Ministry ofNatural Resources, and one of
the comments he made was thatthe Slate Island caribou in the
Slate Islands, which are in theGreat Lakes and Lake Superior
way, were very dependent onlichens, but the caribou there
were eating tree lichens mostlyand waiting till the winters
(21:24):
brought them down to feed on.
Is that something that youfound or you know about?
Speaker 4 (21:29):
yeah, caribou will eat uh tree lichens.
So you, you know the ones thatpeople sort of uh call the old
man's beard lichens, those,those sort of tufty ones that
there's actually probably 12different species or more that
sort of, are all labeled, uh,lumped together as old man's
beard as a common name, but theyhave various different
scientific names.
Definitely, caribou will eatthose off the trees if the
(21:53):
snow's too deep or the snow'stoo crusty, and those are an
important food source.
But they will also dig throughthe snow and eat what people
call the caribou lichens or therainbow reindeer lichens, um
that that they can paw, you know, paw through the snow and eat
that and they're yeah, they'redefinitely a hugely important
food source.
Uh, I haven't done any directresearch on on the links between
(22:17):
lichen and caribou uh on theisland, but it's um, I have a
colleague down the hall who'sworking with a caribou herd on
fogo island and we keep talkingabout maybe holding in some
lichen research.
But you know, you can only doso many things at once.
Speaker 3 (22:30):
Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Hi everybody, I'm Angelo Viola.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
And I'm Pete Bowman.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Now you might know us as the hosts of Canada's
Favorite Fishing Show.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
But now we're hosting a podcast that's right.
Every Thursday, ange and I willbe right here in your ears
bringing you a brand new episodeof Outdoor Journal Radio.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
Now, what are we going to talk about for two
hours every week?
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Well, you know there's going to be a lot of
fishing.
Speaker 6 (22:57):
I knew exactly where those fish were going to be and
how to catch them, and they wereeasy to catch.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Yeah, but it's not just a fishing show.
We're going to be talking topeople from all facets of the
outdoors, from athletes, All theother guys would go golfing.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Me and Garth and Turk and all the Russians would go
fishing.
To scientists.
But now that we're reforestingand laying things free.
Speaker 6 (23:18):
It's the perfect transmission environment for the
line to be.
Speaker 7 (23:22):
To chefs If any game isn't cooked properly, marinated
, you will taste it.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
And whoever else will pick up the phone.
Speaker 1 (23:33):
Wherever you are.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Outdoor Journal Radio seeks to answer the questions
and tell the stories of allthose who enjoy being outside.
Find us on Spotify, applePodcasts or wherever you get
your podcasts wherever you getyour podcasts.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
And now it's time for another testimonial for Chaga
Health and Wellness.
Okay, we're here with Kim fromBob Cajun and Kim, you had a
great experience with the Chagacream and your grandson.
Can you tell us about that abit?
Speaker 5 (24:01):
Yeah, so my grandson actually struggles with
psoriasis.
He's only 16 years old, so ofcourse, the self-esteem right.
He doesn't want his face allcovered in scales and stuff like
that.
And I picked him up on aweekend to come and visit with
me and I had overheard youtalking to somebody about
(24:21):
psoriasis.
So it kind of piqued myinterest and I thought I would
ask you about that.
And when you explained it to meI took a container home for him
.
Speaker 3 (24:30):
Right.
Speaker 5 (24:31):
And in one day he was over the moon, happy that his
face looked clear and he's goingto be religiously doing it
because he's so self-consciousabout it.
Okay.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
So he tried other things uh, the, the medical
system and things like that and,yeah, he just didn't have any
success, correct he?
Speaker 5 (24:50):
had a prescription of cream and you know, it would
sort of dry it up a little bit.
But that was the problem.
It just dries it up and thenit's flaky on his face and he
doesn't really like that and itleaves a lot of little red
blotchy stuff right.
So after he rubbed that stuffon the chaga stuff he was his
face didn't look so angry youknow because it's a red, angry
(25:12):
sort of right on his face and itdidn't look so angry, it looked
soft and and clear.
So he was over the moon happy,and so I took him home, and then
he messaged me after a coupleof days to tell me that he's so,
so happy that his skin looksclear.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
Great.
Thanks very much, kim.
From Bob Gajan.
Speaker 5 (25:30):
You're welcome, okay.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
We interrupt this program to bring you a special
offer from Chaga Health andWellness.
Offer from Chaga Health andWellness.
If you've listened this far andyou're still wondering about
this strange mushroom that Ikeep talking about and whether
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interest to you.
To thank you for listening tothe show, I'm going to make
trying Chaga that much easier bygiving you a dollar off all our
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Hey, thanks for listening Backto the episode.
Now.
I know that you're listed on apaper dealing with lichens that
you wrote with a number of otherindividuals.
Maybe you can kind of elaborateon that or expand on that
(26:46):
individuals.
Speaker 4 (26:46):
Maybe you can kind of elaborate on that or expand on
that.
Yeah, that's one of my latestpapers, which is a new area of
research for me in centralNewfoundland.
So lichen diversity on theisland of Newfoundland.
There's been lichenologists whohave come here to do research
from mainland North America,from the United States, from
Europe, for quite a number ofdecades and there's some key
(27:07):
parts of the island ofNewfoundland that are sort of
known globally as lichenhotspots.
One of these is on the AvalonPeninsula where I did a lot of
my earlier work on lichens.
It's an area called Hull'sGullies and it's sort of known
globally in the lichenologyworld as a hotspot.
But central Newfoundland is alittle bit more continental in
(27:28):
climate.
It's had a lot more industrialforestry so the forest is a lot
younger.
There's been a lot moredisturbance at larger scales
than this sort of coastal Avalonarea which gets a lot of fog, a
lot of of moisture.
It has a very sort of oceanicclimate which is ideal growing
conditions for for lichens, andso we hadn't historically um
(27:51):
thought of central newfoundlandas as being particularly
interesting for lichen diversitybecause, as I mentioned, they
like these older forests.
They also like areas with a lotof high humidity.
So I'd been doing a lot of workin this hulls gullies area this
sort of known hotspot for forabout a decade.
(28:16):
And then a couple of years ago,a gentleman from central
Newfoundland who's a member ofHullapoo First Nation and had
been doing, you know, travelingthrough his family's traditional
territory.
He contacted me by email and hesaid, you know that the subject
line of the email was aquestion about an interesting
lichen.
Subject line of the email wasquestion about an interesting
lichen, and I get emails likethis from time to time where
people see something and they,you know, they find my website
and they find out I know alittle bit about lichen and they
want to identify it.
And I thought, oh, centralNewfoundland, this is not going
to be anything interesting.
(28:37):
Like any time I've looked atlichens in central Newfoundland,
they're just sort of more thoseweedy species.
And I opened up the attachmentand it's this absolutely
stunning lichen in this groupcalled cyano lichens, which are
a special subgroup of lichensthat are uniquely sensitive to
air quality.
They're a little bit more rareand they like, tend to like
(28:59):
higher humidity and they're nottypical for that area.
So that right away piqued myinterest.
So I contacted him and heinvited me out and we went, we
did some exploring around hisarea and I quickly realized this
is a little bit of a differentpocket of Newfoundland than what
(29:20):
you would expect for centralNewfoundland.
So I'm not a lichenologist, as Imentioned, I'm a landscaping
scholar.
So I contacted my collaborator,dr Troy McMullen, who's at the
Canadian Museum of Nature andhe's a lichenologist, and so he
came out and we did about fivedays of surveying in all kinds
of different habitats just tosort of try to document some of
(29:42):
this diversity.
We also had a few days withsome other lichen experts and we
compiled all that informationto document the total species
richness in this little area.
It's about 120 squarekilometers in central
Newfoundland and we found 175species of lichens in that area,
which is higher than I think wewould have expected for central
(30:05):
Newfoundland and is comparableto this other hot spot on the
Avalon.
Speaker 3 (30:09):
So what do the lichens normally feed on?
Speaker 4 (30:13):
So lichens essentially Troy, my colleague
the lichenologist he likes todescribe them as they basically
eat the air.
So lichens are a reallyinteresting organism.
So in the textbooks you knowthat you might have learned in
school they they'recharacterized as this symbiotic
association.
(30:34):
So this combination of twodifferent organisms living
together.
The main part of it is a fungus, Right, and then it houses
within its tissues, it housesthese algae cells, so these
single-celled plants.
So essentially thesesingle-celled plants are
photosynthesizing, they're usingthe sun's energy, they're using
liquid water from fog or fromrainfall and the fungus is sort
(30:59):
of absorbing that for them.
It's keeping these littlesingle-celled plants in a stable
environment within the fungaltissues and those little single
cell plants are making sugars,just like every plant does, and
the fungus part of the lichen isliving off those sugars that
the algae is making.
And then the cyanolichens,which is those rarer ones,
(31:21):
actually have a cyanobacteriawhich is in a completely
different kingdom again, andthose cyanobacteria are bacteria
that also can photosynthesizeand make sugars from the sun's
energy.
So lichens are the whole idea ofwhat is a lichen is really kind
of, in academic circles, a hottopic, because we, you know,
(31:43):
historically, was sort ofthought of as just the simple,
simple sort of associationbetween a fungus and an algae,
and it's just these two thingsliving together in a partnership
.
But now we know that in somecases there's a third partner,
this bacteria um.
So you actually have threedifferent kingdoms living
together the fungus kingdom, theplant kingdom and the bacterial
kingdom.
But then we're now finding outthat there's some lichens that
(32:05):
have multiple species of fungus,um, in combination with you
know, these, these photobionts,um, and so we're starting to,
like knowledge, are reallystarting to characterize them
more as miniaturized ecosystemsthat sort of run on their own
and have all these complexinteractions at this very, very
small extent.
(32:26):
So they're quite fascinating.
Speaker 3 (32:30):
So with the relationship, is it like an
arbuscular or an ectorelationship, where they connect
to each other through the rootsof the fungal world?
Speaker 4 (32:40):
No.
So lichens don't have any roots.
They sometimes will have theselittle hairs on their undersides
, called rhizomes, that looklike roots, and those are.
Those are essentially justfunction, kind of like Velcro.
They help the lichen attach toits substrate, but there's no.
There's no vascular tissue.
There's nothing that's sort ofabsorbing nutrients from the
tree that it's growing on or thesoil that it's growing on tree
(33:06):
that it's growing on or the soilthat it's growing on.
They're simply just hanging onthere and they're getting all of
their energy from their littlephotobiont buddies, whether
that's an algae or acyanobacteria.
That's where all the foodenergy is coming from the fungus
.
So, unlike mycorrhizal fungiwhich you see in the soil that
have this close association withroots, or fungi that you see on
a log that are decomposing thelog and getting their energy
(33:29):
from that decomposed tissue,lichens are getting their energy
from photosynthesis becausethey have these other tissues,
these other organisms livingwithin the fungal tissue.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
Very interesting.
So are there more and moremedicinal applications being
found with lichens?
I think old man's beard is oneof the ones you mentioned.
I believe that there are somemedicinal applications found
with old man's beard, but I'mnot sure because I haven't
really looked into it in depthand I'm not sure if you looked
at it at all.
Speaker 4 (34:02):
Yeah, this is not my area of expertise, but
definitely there is a whole areaof interest in lichen chemistry
.
Lichens produce that's theother fascinating thing about
them.
They produce all kinds ofchemical compounds.
They estimate that there'sprobably at least 200 or more
different chemicals that lichenscan produce, and some of those
(34:24):
compounds can likely havemedicinal properties.
But we don't really.
They're not yet well studied.
We do know from, you know,traditional knowledge, we have
some documentation of certainspecies of lichens being used to
, you know, control, things likeinflammation, to be a
(34:45):
disinfectant.
There's definitely lichens thathave antimicrobial properties
and we even see there's birdspecies will line their nests
with lichens as a way of keepingthe emerging, you know, the
baby's birds.
When they hatch they haven'tbuilt up their immunity and so
having lichens lining the nestis a way of helping keeping
(35:06):
microbes that might infect thechicks as they're developing,
help keep them from getting sick.
And then some of the lichenchemicals are also used in dyes,
natural dyeing.
So yeah, lichen chemistry isthis whole other sort of
subdiscipline.
That again, not a lot of people, there's a few people working
on, but there's just so muchmore that we don't know yet.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
Yeah, I know old man's beard is antimicrobial.
That has a number of differentapplications that are used for
treating wounds and things likethat from a lot of other
research that I've done and lookat that.
But I don't know about many ofthe other lichens or the
applications there at all.
Speaker 4 (35:46):
Yeah, and we don't.
Unlike medicinal plants, whichare easy to identify, lichens
can be pretty tricky to identify.
So the one that folks call oldman's beard is usually this sort
of greeny one that hangs downfrom the trees.
Or sometimes there's a brownishone that sometimes gets called
old man's beard, but I've alsoseen it called horsehair lichen.
(36:08):
In reality there's probably adozen species that look like
that, that either look like thatbrown one or that green one,
and you really need to have anexpert tell you how to tell them
apart.
And so telling people that, oh,you know, old man's beard has
medicinal properties.
(36:28):
It might be just one species ofthat group that has those
medicinal properties and theother ones don't.
And because lichens are slowgrowing, you know they can
easily be susceptible toover-harvesting.
So we don't like to sort oftell people like, oh, this has
these properties because theymight, a harvest the wrong one,
because it's difficult to tellthem apart, and, b, there's just
(36:51):
too much of a risk ofover-harvesting.
It's not like a medicinal plant, like Labrador tea, where you
can pluck a few leaves.
There's Labrador tea everywhere.
It'll grow back, it's not anissue.
But with lichensens, wherethey're so slow growing, um,
it's, it's just best to sort ofleave them be.
The folks I know who do um uselichens for dyeing, they only
harvest lichens that are onbranches that have fallen from
(37:14):
the trees.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
So I see so, yeah, so there could be a lot of yeah
there's.
There's like a lot of mushroomswhere there could be numerous
types of the same that look thesame.
You got to make sure you'regetting the right thing, and so
you need some expertise in orderto be able to identify the
right one.
Speaker 4 (37:27):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
Yep, so now also Yolanda, you've published a book
.
Maybe you can kind of give ussome background and details
about your book.
Speaker 4 (37:36):
Yeah.
So yeah, to kind of veer back towhere we started with landscape
ecology, as a landscapeecologist we, as I mentioned, we
tend to do our work at theselarge spatial extents and it can
be difficult to do experimentsat that scale.
Occasionally you get thatability to do sort of a
comparison, like we were talkingabout with the spruce budworm,
(37:58):
where you might have a protectedarea like a park, where
spraying hasn't happened, andyou compare that to an adjacent
area.
But in an experimental senseyou have no replication and a
good experiment you shouldalways have replicates just to
make sure what you're seeingisn't a chance event.
And so I've always beenfascinated with the idea of well
(38:19):
, how do we, how could we dorobust experiments in landscape
ecology?
And when I discovered the worldof lichens about 10 years ago
and discovered, you know, theycould be used as a model system,
that enabled some replication,because I could sort of scale
these down to the landscapes oftree trunks.
(38:39):
But then that got me thinkingjust more about the concept of
experimentation in landscapeecology generally.
And so, yeah, a few years ago Iwrote a book called
Experimental Landscape Ecology,and it's essentially a book
written for my peers in thediscipline, about ideas on the
different ways that we can dorobust experiments in our
(39:00):
discipline.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
And so, what sort of robust experiments do you
suggest or you highlight in yourbook?
Speaker 4 (39:06):
Yeah, so there's different approaches.
So there are experiments atthose big extents where you can
do sort of manipulations,sometimes in collaboration with,
say, land managers.
So you if you have an areathat's going to be harvested,
say for forestry, if you workwith a forest company and you
get them to harvest in kind ofan experimental fashion, you
(39:29):
might be able to have kind ofthat, you know, control,
replicate and have treatmentsthat are a little bit more
amenable to a statisticalanalysis.
But I also talk about how wecan harness scaled down tools to
do experiments at smallerscales and then extrapolate that
back up to larger extents.
(39:49):
And then I also have a chapterwhere I talk about how we can
use computer simulation modelsto try to understand some of
these landscape scale processesin a sort of like in Ontario.
Speaker 3 (40:06):
The Ministry of Natural Resources here is
responsible for well, it used tobe when I was minister.
Now there's a separate ministryof forestry it's called where
we predominantly did somethingcalled moose mosaic cuts, which
was forest harvesting designedfor moose populations, for moose
populations.
However, other governmentslater on did a caribou mosaic,
(40:31):
which means they go in and cutlarge swaths of land in order to
allow mostly lichens to grow inthose areas, because lichens
require a significant amount oftime in order to support caribou
life.
So there's different ways ofcutting the landscape in ontario
a moose mosaic, which is kindof patchwork to allow connecting
links or large areas so theycan be undisturbed for lengthy
(40:54):
periods of times to allowlichens to grow on.
I guess it's the same sort ofidea of what you're speaking
about with your, your book, yourexperimental landscape ecology
yes, exactly that would be.
Speaker 4 (41:04):
those would be examples of sort of harnessing
forest management in anexperimental fashion and
comparing, you know, how dothese species respond to these
two different sort of forestprescriptions, forest harvest
prescriptions.
And there are examples ofstudies that have done similar
kinds of things withexperimental forestry at large
(41:25):
spatial extents all over theworld.
So my book basically just sortof collects, you know, a huge
survey of the scientificliterature from around the world
and the book is basically kindof a synthesis.
It's aimed mostly at graduatestudents or other researchers
just to give a summary of whatthe sort of state of knowledge
is on this.
Speaker 3 (41:44):
So basically, it was just your ideas to give a
summary of what the sort ofstate of knowledge is on this.
So basically it was just yourideas.
Now, when you were in theNorthwest Territories and
Ontario and different, did thatkind of inspire you, because you
see different things indifferent provinces to try and
write the book.
Speaker 4 (41:59):
The inspiration for the book really came out of
starting to work on this scaledown system with the lichens,
which is something that I onlycame to about 10 years ago and
that just really starting tomake me think about how do we do
experiments at these broadextents.
Speaker 3 (42:17):
Okay, very interesting.
So how do people get a copy ofyour book or where can they get
more information about your work?
Yolanda copy of your book orwhere can they get more
information about your work.
Speaker 4 (42:25):
Yolanda.
So the book is published bySpringer and, as I said, it's a
little bit of a technical book,so it's aimed more at academic
audience.
But you could order it directfrom Springer.
I think most of the majorbookstores will bring it in for
you.
But if you want to find outmore about my work, um, but if
you want to find out more aboutmy work, um, I'm really findable
(42:45):
, uh, if you just Google YolandaWiersma, um, most of the hits
will be me, um.
Or if you go MemorialUniversity of Newfoundland and
look for me on, uh, you know, doa search there, you'll you'll
hit my uh research page prettyquickly and I have links to, um,
some of my research papers.
I try to keep my website prettyup to date with what my
students are up to.
(43:08):
But if your listeners areinterested in lichens, I will
plug two other books by mycolleague, troy McMullen, which
he's done a really excellent jobas a lichenologist to
communicate the complexity oflichens and just their awesome
diversity and beauty to a broadaudience.
So just last year he published abook with Firefly called
(43:30):
Lichens the Macro Lichens ofOntario in the Great Lakes
region and it's a nice, not tootechnical guide that describes a
lot of the species you will seein the Great Lakes region of
Ontario but beyond that and it'sa book I highly recommend
picking up for somebody who'sinterested in learning more
(43:52):
about lichen diversity and thenthe other one he co-published
with Francis Anderson, who's alichenologist from Nova Scotia.
It's called Common Lichens ofNortheastern North America and
it's just a nice little fieldguide like very lightweight,
fits in your backpack.
All of the species in it arefield identifiable, which not.
There's many, many lichens thatare not field identifiable.
(44:12):
You have to take them back tothe lab to either look at under
a microscope or do chemicaltests on.
But this little book, superlightweight, fits in your
backpack, will teach you toidentify over 130 different
species, and that one'spublished by the New York
Botanical Gardens Press.
So it's a little bit harder toget your hands on, but it is a
highly worthwhile book to haveif you're interested in learning
(44:34):
about lichens.
Speaker 3 (44:35):
So whereabouts is Troy located?
Where are these individualslocated?
Well, troy would be basically,I guess, from lichens of Ontario
, and Great Lake regions wouldbe from Ontario.
Speaker 4 (44:45):
Yes, he's a research scientist and lichenologist at
the Canadian Museum of Nature,so he's based in Ottawa.
And then Francis, who's hisco-author on the book with the
New York Botanical Gardens, isbased in Nova Scotia.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
Very good.
Well, yolanda, thank you verymuch for taking the time.
It's very interesting.
It's a topic that I don't havea lot of experience on or a lot
of knowledge about, and I'm sureit would be the same for a lot
of our listeners as well, andit's always good to learn about
these different communities thatlive out there under the canopy
(45:19):
and find out more informationabout how our systems work, and
not only that, but also the onin dealing with landscapes and
all the the other things.
And and tell us once more, howcan people get more information
from you or how can they getyour book experimental landscape
ecology uh, so they can get thebook through uh springer press
(45:39):
and they can find out about me.
Speaker 4 (45:41):
If you just go to the university website, uh munca,
so for memorial university ofnewfoundland, and then just in
the search, search for YolandaWiersma, you'll hit me, or just
Yolanda Wiersma in Google.
I think I'm the only YolandaWiersma out there, so I'm pretty
easy to find and I'm alwayshappy to hear from folks and if
(46:01):
you just my contact informationis on my Web page and I'm happy
to chat with people aboutlichens, about landscapes, about
boreal forests.
Speaker 3 (46:11):
So if people find an interesting lichen, they can
send you an image of it formaybe some discussion.
Speaker 4 (46:17):
Certainly I can't promise I'll identify it, but
you never know what where thatmight lead to.
Speaker 3 (46:22):
Well, thank you very much, Yolanda.
We really appreciate you takingthe time to enlighten us on
this, these couple ofinteresting topics, and it's
just a little bit somethingdifferent that people are
learning about what's happeningout there under the canopy.
Thanks, yolanda.
Speaker 4 (46:34):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 6 (46:53):
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How did a small-town sheet metal mechanic come to
build one of Canada's mosticonic fishing lodges?
I'm your host, steve Nitzwicky,and you'll find out about that
and a whole lot more on theOutdoor Journal Radio Network's
newest podcast, diaries of aLodge Owner.
But this podcast will be morethan that.
Every week on Diaries of aLodge Owner, I'm going to
(00:25):
introduce you to a ton of greatpeople, share their stories of
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Meanwhile we're sitting therebobbing along trying to figure
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As the world gets louder and louder, the lessons
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But they are still available tothose who know where to listen.
I'm Jerry Ouellette and I washonoured to serve as Ontario's
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However, my journey into thewoods didn't come from politics.
(01:34):
Rather, it came from my time inthe bush and a mushroom.
In 2015, I was introduced tothe birch-hungry fungus known as
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(02:02):
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So join me today for anothergreat episode and hopefully we
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canopy people to live theirlives under the canopy Well, as
(02:53):
always.
We want to thank all ourlisteners around Canada, around
the world, in Switzerland andGhana, trinidad and Tobago and
the States, of course, and youknow it was an interesting
morning.
It's that time of year where thesap is still kind of sort of
running and we're out doing aboil.
So I was out this morning doingthe maple syrup activities,
making sure everything's goingfine for our special blend which
(03:14):
we make available at shows andthings like that.
It's called Chaga Maple and ofcourse, my chocolate lab Ensign
Gunner looks up at me like comeon, dad, what's going on?
Are we going for our walk?
Are we doing our morning run?
Well, on maple syrup time, heusually gets out in the bush
with me so he gets lots of timelater on, but it looks like it's
closing down very shortly andwe should be moving forward with
(03:38):
the finish of the maple syrupseason, cleaning up all the pans
and all the buckets and thelids, and all that because we
still use an old system.
We got about 150, 200 taps whenwe're all fully operational,
but it's going well.
And anyways, this morning we'vegot a special guest, yolanda
Wiersma.
Welcome to the program, yolanda.
Speaker 4 (03:57):
Thank you for having me.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Well, that's good.
And, yolanda, maybe tell us abit about yourself First of all.
Whereabouts are you located, soour international guests can
kind of figure out where you'recontacting us from.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
Yeah, for sure.
I am in the province ofNewfoundland and Labrador, on
the island of Newfoundland, inthe city of St John's.
So if you picture a map ofNorth America and you look for
that big island to thenortheastern part of Canada, st
John's is on the easternmostedge of that big island.
So I am as far east as you canget in North America.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Yeah, it was interesting.
I have to tell you that when mywife and I celebrated our 25th
wedding anniversary I said toher I said where do you want to
go?
She said I want to go toNewfoundland.
You know something?
Their marketing and promotionmust be doing wonders because,
sure enough, for our 25thanniversary we went to
Newfoundland in May and rented avehicle and drove up all along
(04:53):
the eastern shore and all thedifferent communities right up
past Gander and all the way upquite a bit up, and I found it
very, very interesting.
And the one thing I found veryinteresting about
Newfoundlanders was a lot ofthem know exactly where or had
relatives or friends that workedin Oshawa, predominantly at the
General Motors automotive planthere or one of the feeder
(05:13):
plants, and they seem to have agood sense of it.
But it was a great province ofpeople are extremely friendly,
hardworking and dedicatedindividuals and we very much
appreciated the time that we didspend in Newfoundland.
Yeah, awesome.
Yeah, it's a great place to live.
Yeah, it is well.
I don't know how's the winterbeen you still, you got snow
there in st john's, or you know.
Speaker 4 (05:34):
I don't think so we had a very uh, snow-free winter,
uh, which is sad because I'm aI'm a big fan of winter, I'm a
nordic skier and it was kind ofa sad winter to be a skier.
But our wintersters are reallyvariable.
In the almost 20 years I'velived here, we've had winters
where snow's on the ground inDecember and doesn't leave until
April, and I've even skied aslate as May long weekend once.
(05:57):
And then we have winters wheremaybe there's only five or six
weekends with snow on the groundand it's mostly falling as rain
.
So it's it's very variable, butthe winters here are
comparatively mild compared tocentral Canada.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
Yeah, the snow depth, I understand, can be quite a
bit once the hard winters hit.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
Yes, it can be.
Yes, oh yes, we've had, we'vehad some pretty pretty good
storms with a lot of snow.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
Well, when we were there and I'm noticing a friend,
I don't know if you know I'mnoticing a friend, I don't know
if you know we've been there 20years.
I don't know if you know SteveKent.
He was a provincial member that, just out Mount Royal, I think
it was was his riding.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
Oh yeah, so name rings a bell.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
Yeah, just there.
So I went into the legislature,which I found very interesting
because Newfoundland is the onlylegislature in the province or
in Canada, of all thelegislatures, where the
governing body sits to the leftof the speaker.
Everybody else sits to theright.
And so I went in and I was inthe chambers.
(06:59):
We were in the chambers whenthe session was on and found it
very interesting that thegoverning body was sitting on
the left-hand side of thespeaker and they told me they
said well, what happened wasthat the heaters broke down one
winter and the only heater wasworking was on the left-hand
side of the speaker.
(07:19):
So they moved the governmentbody to the left-hand side and
they stayed there.
Yeah, it was interesting.
We were there in May when ouranniversary was, and we were
told that well, you know, it'snot a good month to be here,
it's not something that a lot ofpeople would want to come out
in May, but we had no problemsat all and drove up the eastern
(07:41):
coastline and very much enjoyedit.
Speaker 4 (07:43):
Oh great.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Yeah, Now you mentioned you've been in
Newfoundland for 20 years.
Where were you before that?
Speaker 4 (07:54):
I grew up in southern Ontario in the Niagara
Peninsula, and I've lived allover various parts of Ontario,
spent a couple of summers on theNorth Shore of Superior, spent
a lot of time in the GeorgianBay area and lived right in
Toronto for about five years andspent a year in the Northwest
Territories and, yeah, thenended up out here.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
Oh, interesting.
You were in the territories,you were there for a year.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
you said yeah, I actually.
In a previous life I was a highschool teacher and I taught up
there for a year.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Oh, very interesting.
So now you have a position atuniversity, correct?
Speaker 4 (08:24):
That's right, I'm at Memorial University.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
Tell us what you do at Memorial.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
I am a professor in the biology department here, so
my job is a mix of primarilyteaching and research.
So half of my time I'm teachingundergraduates mostly ecology
courses teaching undergraduatesmostly ecology courses and then
the other half of the time I'mdoing either my own research or
(08:50):
I'm supervising graduatestudents.
So in my research group I haveat any given time anywhere
between three and eight or ninegraduate students, so those
would be master's or PhDstudents doing their own
independent research that I'msupervising.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Oh, very interesting.
So just for our listenersgetting an understanding,
because not many know what anecology course is kind of give
us a breakdown of what anecology course is.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
Sure.
So ecology is essentially thestudy of our home.
So eco, actually, the root wordcomes from the Greek word for
home and ology is the study, soit's the study of our natural
home.
And ecologists study theinteractions between living
things and their environments,and they do that in all kinds of
different ways.
They might study it at thelevel of the individual.
(09:34):
So how do individual organismsthat could be plants, animals,
insects, what have you?
How do they adapt to theparticular environment that they
live in?
They can also study populations.
So how do populations ebb andflow through time and what
drives those changes topopulations?
Some ecologists studycommunities, so they might look
(09:56):
at all of the organisms in, say,a pond community or a meadow
community.
And my branch of ecology iscalled landscape ecology.
So I study those interactionsat extremely large spatial, uh
extents, at the scale of entirelandscapes so how large would an
entire landscape be?
Speaker 3 (10:14):
you're referring to somebody's household.
Are you looking at an acre?
10 acres, 100 acres, a thousandacres?
Speaker 4 (10:20):
yeah, that's a great question and I get, I get asked
that all the time.
So, um, it can be to.
It's usually at the extent ofseveral kilometers to tens or
even hundreds of kilometers.
In landscape ecology we like todefine.
People always ask you know well, what do you mean by when you
say a landscape?
And we like to describe it aswhat you can see from an
(10:41):
airplane window.
So if you think about, you know,being on a cross-continental
flight on a cloudless day andyou've got a window seat and
you're looking down, you cantell if you're flying over.
You know flatland or rollinghills or bumpy hills, mountains,
whatever it is, and those arethe land forms.
And you can also see what'scovering the land.
You can see whether it'sforests and you can usually tell
(11:03):
if it's deciduous or coniferousforest.
You don't see the individualtrees, you can't identify the
species, but you can see, youcan discriminate the forest from
the fields and all that.
Those are the land covers.
And then you can also see thehuman land uses.
You can see the roads, you cansee the railways, you can see
the towns, you can see theindustries, you can see where
humans have altered thelandscape for agriculture.
You know where forest harvestis taking place, and those are
(11:25):
the land uses.
And so all three of thosethings combined land cover, land
form and land uses are whatmake up a landscape the way we
understand it in my discipline,and so we look at how those
things interact to theninfluence the species that live
on that landscape and also howthe species might in turn help
shape those patterns.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Very interesting.
So you mentioned, yolanda, thatyou had some students masters
and PhD students that were doingtheir thesis or their papers.
What kind of research do theytypically are they doing in your
classes that you're dealingwith them?
Speaker 4 (12:04):
Yeah, it's over the years it's been kind of lots of
variety, I'd say the sort ofthing that's in common is it's
usually focused here inNewfoundland and usually has
something to do with an appliedproblem related either to
conservation or resourcemanagement.
So I've had students, we do alot of work in the national
(12:25):
parks here in Terranova andGrossmoor National Parks with my
colleagues and my collaboratorsand we've done stuff with the
provincial wildlife divisionlooking at trying to understand
distributions of species ofinterest.
So it's really varied.
But I really like to haveresearch that feeds into some
kind of applied problem andhopefully influences things like
(12:48):
management decisions, policydecisions, that sort of thing.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
Very interesting.
Now you mentioned you do a lotof the parks and they were
looking for management sourcesto try and deal with the
overpopulation so they didn'thave big swings or die-offs in
(13:14):
large numbers.
Did any of your students orhave you worked with any of the
moose population problem thatwas taking place at that time in
Newfoundland?
Speaker 4 (13:23):
Yes, actually we have my colleague, dr Sean LaRue,
and I have a project that we'rejust wrapping up.
That's in the two parks, andit's directly related to sort of
examining the effect of mooseon plant communities, liking
diversity and as well as thebuildup of carbon and nitrogen
in both plants and soils.
(13:44):
And so we've been doing thatproject for a number of years
and we were also takingadvantage of these moose
exclosures that were developedhere, quite actually before my
time, by a now retired colleagueof mine, dr Louise Hermanutes,
in collaboration with both theprovincial government and the
two parks, and these are largefenced areas that keep the moose
(14:06):
out, and so we can sort ofunderstand how the forest would
grow back following adisturbance, in the absence of
moose.
And then we compare that toadjacent areas and we're looking
at a lot of how the forestresponds to different
disturbances, so things likeinsect outbreaks, wind throw,
fires, as well as logging, andthen how the forest grows back
(14:28):
both with and without moose inand out of the parks.
And the parks when you werehere they would have just been
starting to think about actuallyintroducing moose hunting.
So we also have some data, thatsort of traces how the forest
has been changing and then thetwo parks have had some hunting
and it is showing an impact inthat the forest is starting to
(14:51):
come back, with a little bit ofpopulation control on the moose.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
Yeah, I know that when I was there, one of the
things that I discussed with theministry responsible for
dealing with those issues inNewfoundland and Labrador was
was that Ontario?
At one point we traded actuallymoose for turkeys with Michigan
and other jurisdictions andthey were quite surprised you
actually traded animals.
I said, yeah, we helicopteredinto Michigan and things like
that and had quick turnoverswhich helped stabilize a lot of
(15:20):
the moose populations in otherjurisdictions.
So they were thinking outsidethe box when we sort of brought
those sort of ideas in, whichwas good to hear.
But now Newfoundland obviouslyis a large island.
Do they get the same sort ofdiseases coming in that would
affect, like the spruce budwormand those sort of things that
(15:41):
come in and actually have animpact on a lot of the forest as
they found in otherjurisdictions?
Or because it's an island, it'snot quite as as hit as hard, or
you get as many of thosediseases coming in, or would you
know?
Speaker 4 (15:54):
um, I'm not an expert on all diseases but in terms of
uh, forest pests, we do havespruce spudworm.
In fact we're just sort of atthe beginning stages of the
spruce spudworm outbreak on theisland right now.
But we also have hemlock.
Looper is another forest insectthat we've got out here.
So we do have ones that youwould find in the eastern boreal
(16:17):
on mainland Canada.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
So now are you familiar with management
practices and how they're tryingto deal with the spruce budworm
and the hemlock looper.
So with the spruce budworm andthe hemlock looper.
Speaker 4 (16:26):
So with the spruce budworm, the province does do
some spraying with BT.
As far as I'm aware, that's themain spray and there's some
controversy around that they'renot spraying in the two national
parks right now.
So from a scientific pointthat's kind of interesting
because you have sort of anatural experiment and again,
(16:49):
doing experiments at a landscapescale is often tricky.
But with the fact that there'ssimilar forests in and outside
of the boundaries of a nationalpark you can assess what the
impact of these outbreaks whichare naturally cycling, and the
boreal forest is adisturbance-driven ecosystem.
(17:09):
It is interesting just to sortof see how that will sort of
play out over time when you cancompare an area where there's
been spraying versus wherethere's not been spraying.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
Yeah, I know spruce budworm has had a significant
impact in a lot of otherjurisdictions and one of the
ways that they dealt with it wasthey allowed the forest
companies to go in and do majorcuts in order to take out the
fiber before it was totallyuseless, which had a huge impact
.
Well, when you look into theecology of the impacts on the
(17:43):
society because all of a suddenthere was huge amounts of fiber
that were available whichdecreased the price of wood
products Canada-wide in ourlocations where sales were done
and I don't know if they lookedat those sort of impacts as well
as potentially increasing theirharvest in order to make sure
that that fiber that has beencontaminated is utilized before
(18:05):
it becomes basically a wastematerial but those are different
ways to look at sort of thingsyeah, definitely, um, you know
forest, for I I not a trainedforester, but a lot of my
research has sort of uh, been inin forest ecology, so I do do a
lot of chatting with forestmanagers, and forest management
(18:28):
is a very complex area to workin.
Speaker 4 (18:33):
You're balancing a lot of social pressures,
economic pressures, ecological,and they're complex ecosystems
too.
So, yeah, it's a very complexand nuanced too.
Oh, absolutely yeah, it's avery complex and nuanced area in
which to work.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
Now, I know we didn't plan on talking about a lot of
the forestry stuff, but theHemlock loop.
Are you familiar with theimpacts that are taking place in
Newfoundland there?
Speaker 4 (19:02):
Not really.
We haven't had an outbreak ofthat one in a long time, so it's
kind of not on anybody's radarat the moment.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
Okay, that's good to hear.
So what research are youyourself working on then,
Yolanda?
Speaker 4 (19:15):
So, in addition to the work in the two parks on
carbon nitrogen in the plantsand the soils, the other work
I'm doing is what I call lichenlandscape ecology.
So I'm taking some of theprinciples of landscape ecology
and using lichens as kind of amodel system to understand
(19:36):
ecological processes acrossdifferent spatial scales.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
Well, lichens are.
I think they're predominantlythe main food for caribou
species, is it not?
Speaker 4 (19:47):
Yes, they are.
Speaker 3 (19:49):
And so what is the impact of the lichens on the
caribou populations, or what areyou finding?
Are you finding anyrelationships there with that?
Speaker 4 (20:00):
So lichens are definitely hugely important for
caribou and we do have caribouhere on the island but those
kinds of lichens are not my mainarea of research.
Those are ground lichens, butlichens are actually here a huge
diverse group.
We probably have.
We have probably over 300species or more of lichens here
(20:23):
in the province and I primarilystudy the ones that live on the
trees.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
Okay, so how long does it take tree lichens to
grow?
Speaker 4 (20:33):
That's a great question.
They're slow growing andthey'll grow a few millimeters
at a time, and so they tend to.
But there's variation.
There's some lichens that wecan that sort of get labeled as
weed species.
They might grow a little faster, but there are other lichens
that only grow a few millimetersto a few centimeters a year,
(20:55):
and so they really like to be onolder trees in these older
forests.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Now I did a podcast with Bruce Ranta, who is a
biologist for the Ministry ofNatural Resources, and one of
the comments he made was thatthe Slate Island caribou in the
Slate Islands, which are in theGreat Lakes and Lake Superior
way, were very dependent onlichens, but the caribou there
were eating tree lichens mostlyand waiting till the winters
(21:24):
brought them down to feed on.
Is that something that youfound or you know about?
Speaker 4 (21:29):
yeah, caribou will eat uh tree lichens.
So you, you know the ones thatpeople sort of uh call the old
man's beard lichens, those,those sort of tufty ones that
there's actually probably 12different species or more that
sort of, are all labeled, uh,lumped together as old man's
beard as a common name, but theyhave various different
scientific names.
Definitely, caribou will eatthose off the trees if the
(21:53):
snow's too deep or the snow'stoo crusty, and those are an
important food source.
But they will also dig throughthe snow and eat what people
call the caribou lichens or therainbow reindeer lichens, um
that that they can paw, you know, paw through the snow and eat
that and they're yeah, they'redefinitely a hugely important
food source.
Uh, I haven't done any directresearch on on the links between
(22:17):
lichen and caribou uh on theisland, but it's um, I have a
colleague down the hall who'sworking with a caribou herd on
fogo island and we keep talkingabout maybe holding in some
lichen research.
But you know, you can only doso many things at once.
Speaker 3 (22:30):
Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Hi everybody, I'm Angelo Viola.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
And I'm Pete Bowman.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Now you might know us as the hosts of Canada's
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Speaker 2 (22:42):
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Speaker 1 (22:53):
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(24:21):
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(25:12):
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Hey, thanks for listening Backto the episode.
Now.
I know that you're listed on apaper dealing with lichens that
you wrote with a number of otherindividuals.
Maybe you can kind of elaborateon that or expand on that
(26:46):
individuals.
Speaker 4 (26:46):
Maybe you can kind of elaborate on that or expand on
that.
Yeah, that's one of my latestpapers, which is a new area of
research for me in centralNewfoundland.
So lichen diversity on theisland of Newfoundland.
There's been lichenologists whohave come here to do research
from mainland North America,from the United States, from
Europe, for quite a number ofdecades and there's some key
(27:07):
parts of the island ofNewfoundland that are sort of
known globally as lichenhotspots.
One of these is on the AvalonPeninsula where I did a lot of
my earlier work on lichens.
It's an area called Hull'sGullies and it's sort of known
globally in the lichenologyworld as a hotspot.
But central Newfoundland is alittle bit more continental in
(27:28):
climate.
It's had a lot more industrialforestry so the forest is a lot
younger.
There's been a lot moredisturbance at larger scales
than this sort of coastal Avalonarea which gets a lot of fog, a
lot of of moisture.
It has a very sort of oceanicclimate which is ideal growing
conditions for for lichens, andso we hadn't historically um
(27:51):
thought of central newfoundlandas as being particularly
interesting for lichen diversitybecause, as I mentioned, they
like these older forests.
They also like areas with a lotof high humidity.
So I'd been doing a lot of workin this hulls gullies area this
sort of known hotspot for forabout a decade.
(28:16):
And then a couple of years ago,a gentleman from central
Newfoundland who's a member ofHullapoo First Nation and had
been doing, you know, travelingthrough his family's traditional
territory.
He contacted me by email and hesaid, you know that the subject
line of the email was aquestion about an interesting
lichen.
Subject line of the email wasquestion about an interesting
lichen, and I get emails likethis from time to time where
people see something and they,you know, they find my website
and they find out I know alittle bit about lichen and they
want to identify it.
And I thought, oh, centralNewfoundland, this is not going
to be anything interesting.
(28:37):
Like any time I've looked atlichens in central Newfoundland,
they're just sort of more thoseweedy species.
And I opened up the attachmentand it's this absolutely
stunning lichen in this groupcalled cyano lichens, which are
a special subgroup of lichensthat are uniquely sensitive to
air quality.
They're a little bit more rareand they like, tend to like
(28:59):
higher humidity and they're nottypical for that area.
So that right away piqued myinterest.
So I contacted him and heinvited me out and we went, we
did some exploring around hisarea and I quickly realized this
is a little bit of a differentpocket of Newfoundland than what
(29:20):
you would expect for centralNewfoundland.
So I'm not a lichenologist, as Imentioned, I'm a landscaping
scholar.
So I contacted my collaborator,dr Troy McMullen, who's at the
Canadian Museum of Nature andhe's a lichenologist, and so he
came out and we did about fivedays of surveying in all kinds
of different habitats just tosort of try to document some of
(29:42):
this diversity.
We also had a few days withsome other lichen experts and we
compiled all that informationto document the total species
richness in this little area.
It's about 120 squarekilometers in central
Newfoundland and we found 175species of lichens in that area,
which is higher than I think wewould have expected for central
(30:05):
Newfoundland and is comparableto this other hot spot on the
Avalon.
Speaker 3 (30:09):
So what do the lichens normally feed on?
Speaker 4 (30:13):
So lichens essentially Troy, my colleague
the lichenologist he likes todescribe them as they basically
eat the air.
So lichens are a reallyinteresting organism.
So in the textbooks you knowthat you might have learned in
school they they'recharacterized as this symbiotic
association.
(30:34):
So this combination of twodifferent organisms living
together.
The main part of it is a fungus, Right, and then it houses
within its tissues, it housesthese algae cells, so these
single-celled plants.
So essentially thesesingle-celled plants are
photosynthesizing, they're usingthe sun's energy, they're using
liquid water from fog or fromrainfall and the fungus is sort
(30:59):
of absorbing that for them.
It's keeping these littlesingle-celled plants in a stable
environment within the fungaltissues and those little single
cell plants are making sugars,just like every plant does, and
the fungus part of the lichen isliving off those sugars that
the algae is making.
And then the cyanolichens,which is those rarer ones,
(31:21):
actually have a cyanobacteriawhich is in a completely
different kingdom again, andthose cyanobacteria are bacteria
that also can photosynthesizeand make sugars from the sun's
energy.
So lichens are the whole idea ofwhat is a lichen is really kind
of, in academic circles, a hottopic, because we, you know,
(31:43):
historically, was sort ofthought of as just the simple,
simple sort of associationbetween a fungus and an algae,
and it's just these two thingsliving together in a partnership
.
But now we know that in somecases there's a third partner,
this bacteria um.
So you actually have threedifferent kingdoms living
together the fungus kingdom, theplant kingdom and the bacterial
kingdom.
But then we're now finding outthat there's some lichens that
(32:05):
have multiple species of fungus,um, in combination with you
know, these, these photobionts,um, and so we're starting to,
like knowledge, are reallystarting to characterize them
more as miniaturized ecosystemsthat sort of run on their own
and have all these complexinteractions at this very, very
small extent.
(32:26):
So they're quite fascinating.
Speaker 3 (32:30):
So with the relationship, is it like an
arbuscular or an ectorelationship, where they connect
to each other through the rootsof the fungal world?
Speaker 4 (32:40):
No.
So lichens don't have any roots.
They sometimes will have theselittle hairs on their undersides
, called rhizomes, that looklike roots, and those are.
Those are essentially justfunction, kind of like Velcro.
They help the lichen attach toits substrate, but there's no.
There's no vascular tissue.
There's nothing that's sort ofabsorbing nutrients from the
tree that it's growing on or thesoil that it's growing on tree
(33:06):
that it's growing on or the soilthat it's growing on.
They're simply just hanging onthere and they're getting all of
their energy from their littlephotobiont buddies, whether
that's an algae or acyanobacteria.
That's where all the foodenergy is coming from the fungus
.
So, unlike mycorrhizal fungiwhich you see in the soil that
have this close association withroots, or fungi that you see on
a log that are decomposing thelog and getting their energy
(33:29):
from that decomposed tissue,lichens are getting their energy
from photosynthesis becausethey have these other tissues,
these other organisms livingwithin the fungal tissue.
Speaker 3 (33:41):
Very interesting.
So are there more and moremedicinal applications being
found with lichens?
I think old man's beard is oneof the ones you mentioned.
I believe that there are somemedicinal applications found
with old man's beard, but I'mnot sure because I haven't
really looked into it in depthand I'm not sure if you looked
at it at all.
Speaker 4 (34:02):
Yeah, this is not my area of expertise, but
definitely there is a whole areaof interest in lichen chemistry
.
Lichens produce that's theother fascinating thing about
them.
They produce all kinds ofchemical compounds.
They estimate that there'sprobably at least 200 or more
different chemicals that lichenscan produce, and some of those
(34:24):
compounds can likely havemedicinal properties.
But we don't really.
They're not yet well studied.
We do know from, you know,traditional knowledge, we have
some documentation of certainspecies of lichens being used to
, you know, control, things likeinflammation, to be a
(34:45):
disinfectant.
There's definitely lichens thathave antimicrobial properties
and we even see there's birdspecies will line their nests
with lichens as a way of keepingthe emerging, you know, the
baby's birds.
When they hatch they haven'tbuilt up their immunity and so
having lichens lining the nestis a way of helping keeping
(35:06):
microbes that might infect thechicks as they're developing,
help keep them from getting sick.
And then some of the lichenchemicals are also used in dyes,
natural dyeing.
So yeah, lichen chemistry isthis whole other sort of
subdiscipline.
That again, not a lot of people, there's a few people working
on, but there's just so muchmore that we don't know yet.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
Yeah, I know old man's beard is antimicrobial.
That has a number of differentapplications that are used for
treating wounds and things likethat from a lot of other
research that I've done and lookat that.
But I don't know about many ofthe other lichens or the
applications there at all.
Speaker 4 (35:46):
Yeah, and we don't.
Unlike medicinal plants, whichare easy to identify, lichens
can be pretty tricky to identify.
So the one that folks call oldman's beard is usually this sort
of greeny one that hangs downfrom the trees.
Or sometimes there's a brownishone that sometimes gets called
old man's beard, but I've alsoseen it called horsehair lichen.
(36:08):
In reality there's probably adozen species that look like
that, that either look like thatbrown one or that green one,
and you really need to have anexpert tell you how to tell them
apart.
And so telling people that, oh,you know, old man's beard has
medicinal properties.
(36:28):
It might be just one species ofthat group that has those
medicinal properties and theother ones don't.
And because lichens are slowgrowing, you know they can
easily be susceptible toover-harvesting.
So we don't like to sort oftell people like, oh, this has
these properties because theymight, a harvest the wrong one,
because it's difficult to tellthem apart, and, b, there's just
(36:51):
too much of a risk ofover-harvesting.
It's not like a medicinal plant, like Labrador tea, where you
can pluck a few leaves.
There's Labrador tea everywhere.
It'll grow back, it's not anissue.
But with lichensens, wherethey're so slow growing, um,
it's, it's just best to sort ofleave them be.
The folks I know who do um uselichens for dyeing, they only
harvest lichens that are onbranches that have fallen from
(37:14):
the trees.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
So I see so, yeah, so there could be a lot of yeah
there's.
There's like a lot of mushroomswhere there could be numerous
types of the same that look thesame.
You got to make sure you'regetting the right thing, and so
you need some expertise in orderto be able to identify the
right one.
Speaker 4 (37:27):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
Yep, so now also Yolanda, you've published a book
.
Maybe you can kind of give ussome background and details
about your book.
Speaker 4 (37:36):
Yeah.
So yeah, to kind of veer back towhere we started with landscape
ecology, as a landscapeecologist we, as I mentioned, we
tend to do our work at theselarge spatial extents and it can
be difficult to do experimentsat that scale.
Occasionally you get thatability to do sort of a
comparison, like we were talkingabout with the spruce budworm,
(37:58):
where you might have a protectedarea like a park, where
spraying hasn't happened, andyou compare that to an adjacent
area.
But in an experimental senseyou have no replication and a
good experiment you shouldalways have replicates just to
make sure what you're seeingisn't a chance event.
And so I've always beenfascinated with the idea of well
(38:19):
, how do we, how could we dorobust experiments in landscape
ecology?
And when I discovered the worldof lichens about 10 years ago
and discovered, you know, theycould be used as a model system,
that enabled some replication,because I could sort of scale
these down to the landscapes oftree trunks.
(38:39):
But then that got me thinkingjust more about the concept of
experimentation in landscapeecology generally.
And so, yeah, a few years ago Iwrote a book called
Experimental Landscape Ecology,and it's essentially a book
written for my peers in thediscipline, about ideas on the
different ways that we can dorobust experiments in our
(39:00):
discipline.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
And so, what sort of robust experiments do you
suggest or you highlight in yourbook?
Speaker 4 (39:06):
Yeah, so there's different approaches.
So there are experiments atthose big extents where you can
do sort of manipulations,sometimes in collaboration with,
say, land managers.
So you if you have an areathat's going to be harvested,
say for forestry, if you workwith a forest company and you
get them to harvest in kind ofan experimental fashion, you
(39:29):
might be able to have kind ofthat, you know, control,
replicate and have treatmentsthat are a little bit more
amenable to a statisticalanalysis.
But I also talk about how wecan harness scaled down tools to
do experiments at smallerscales and then extrapolate that
back up to larger extents.
(39:49):
And then I also have a chapterwhere I talk about how we can
use computer simulation modelsto try to understand some of
these landscape scale processesin a sort of like in Ontario.
Speaker 3 (40:06):
The Ministry of Natural Resources here is
responsible for well, it used tobe when I was minister.
Now there's a separate ministryof forestry it's called where
we predominantly did somethingcalled moose mosaic cuts, which
was forest harvesting designedfor moose populations, for moose
populations.
However, other governmentslater on did a caribou mosaic,
(40:31):
which means they go in and cutlarge swaths of land in order to
allow mostly lichens to grow inthose areas, because lichens
require a significant amount oftime in order to support caribou
life.
So there's different ways ofcutting the landscape in ontario
a moose mosaic, which is kindof patchwork to allow connecting
links or large areas so theycan be undisturbed for lengthy
(40:54):
periods of times to allowlichens to grow on.
I guess it's the same sort ofidea of what you're speaking
about with your, your book, yourexperimental landscape ecology
yes, exactly that would be.
Speaker 4 (41:04):
those would be examples of sort of harnessing
forest management in anexperimental fashion and
comparing, you know, how dothese species respond to these
two different sort of forestprescriptions, forest harvest
prescriptions.
And there are examples ofstudies that have done similar
kinds of things withexperimental forestry at large
(41:25):
spatial extents all over theworld.
So my book basically just sortof collects, you know, a huge
survey of the scientificliterature from around the world
and the book is basically kindof a synthesis.
It's aimed mostly at graduatestudents or other researchers
just to give a summary of whatthe sort of state of knowledge
is on this.
Speaker 3 (41:44):
So basically, it was just your ideas to give a
summary of what the sort ofstate of knowledge is on this.
So basically it was just yourideas.
Now, when you were in theNorthwest Territories and
Ontario and different, did thatkind of inspire you, because you
see different things indifferent provinces to try and
write the book.
Speaker 4 (41:59):
The inspiration for the book really came out of
starting to work on this scaledown system with the lichens,
which is something that I onlycame to about 10 years ago and
that just really starting tomake me think about how do we do
experiments at these broadextents.
Speaker 3 (42:17):
Okay, very interesting.
So how do people get a copy ofyour book or where can they get
more information about your work?
Yolanda copy of your book orwhere can they get more
information about your work.
Speaker 4 (42:25):
Yolanda.
So the book is published bySpringer and, as I said, it's a
little bit of a technical book,so it's aimed more at academic
audience.
But you could order it directfrom Springer.
I think most of the majorbookstores will bring it in for
you.
But if you want to find outmore about my work, um, but if
you want to find out more aboutmy work, um, I'm really findable
(42:45):
, uh, if you just Google YolandaWiersma, um, most of the hits
will be me, um.
Or if you go MemorialUniversity of Newfoundland and
look for me on, uh, you know, doa search there, you'll you'll
hit my uh research page prettyquickly and I have links to, um,
some of my research papers.
I try to keep my website prettyup to date with what my
students are up to.
(43:08):
But if your listeners areinterested in lichens, I will
plug two other books by mycolleague, troy McMullen, which
he's done a really excellent jobas a lichenologist to
communicate the complexity oflichens and just their awesome
diversity and beauty to a broadaudience.
So just last year he published abook with Firefly called
(43:30):
Lichens the Macro Lichens ofOntario in the Great Lakes
region and it's a nice, not tootechnical guide that describes a
lot of the species you will seein the Great Lakes region of
Ontario but beyond that and it'sa book I highly recommend
picking up for somebody who'sinterested in learning more
(43:52):
about lichen diversity and thenthe other one he co-published
with Francis Anderson, who's alichenologist from Nova Scotia.
It's called Common Lichens ofNortheastern North America and
it's just a nice little fieldguide like very lightweight,
fits in your backpack.
All of the species in it arefield identifiable, which not.
There's many, many lichens thatare not field identifiable.
(44:12):
You have to take them back tothe lab to either look at under
a microscope or do chemicaltests on.
But this little book, superlightweight, fits in your
backpack, will teach you toidentify over 130 different
species, and that one'spublished by the New York
Botanical Gardens Press.
So it's a little bit harder toget your hands on, but it is a
highly worthwhile book to haveif you're interested in learning
(44:34):
about lichens.
Speaker 3 (44:35):
So whereabouts is Troy located?
Where are these individualslocated?
Well, troy would be basically,I guess, from lichens of Ontario
, and Great Lake regions wouldbe from Ontario.
Speaker 4 (44:45):
Yes, he's a research scientist and lichenologist at
the Canadian Museum of Nature,so he's based in Ottawa.
And then Francis, who's hisco-author on the book with the
New York Botanical Gardens, isbased in Nova Scotia.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
Very good.
Well, yolanda, thank you verymuch for taking the time.
It's very interesting.
It's a topic that I don't havea lot of experience on or a lot
of knowledge about, and I'm sureit would be the same for a lot
of our listeners as well, andit's always good to learn about
these different communities thatlive out there under the canopy
(45:19):
and find out more informationabout how our systems work, and
not only that, but also the onin dealing with landscapes and
all the the other things.
And and tell us once more, howcan people get more information
from you or how can they getyour book experimental landscape
ecology uh, so they can get thebook through uh springer press
(45:39):
and they can find out about me.
Speaker 4 (45:41):
If you just go to the university website, uh munca,
so for memorial university ofnewfoundland, and then just in
the search, search for YolandaWiersma, you'll hit me, or just
Yolanda Wiersma in Google.
I think I'm the only YolandaWiersma out there, so I'm pretty
easy to find and I'm alwayshappy to hear from folks and if
(46:01):
you just my contact informationis on my Web page and I'm happy
to chat with people aboutlichens, about landscapes, about
boreal forests.
Speaker 3 (46:11):
So if people find an interesting lichen, they can
send you an image of it formaybe some discussion.
Speaker 4 (46:17):
Certainly I can't promise I'll identify it, but
you never know what where thatmight lead to.
Speaker 3 (46:22):
Well, thank you very much, Yolanda.
We really appreciate you takingthe time to enlighten us on
this, these couple ofinteresting topics, and it's
just a little bit somethingdifferent that people are
learning about what's happeningout there under the canopy.
Thanks, yolanda.
Speaker 4 (46:34):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 6 (46:53):
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