Mark Vellend

Professor, Biology
Université de Sherbrooke

mark.vellend@usherbrooke.ca

Biography

Following a postdoc at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis I joined the University of British Columbia as a Canada Research Chair in 2005.  In 2011 I moved to Université de Sherbrooke, where my research focuses on plant population and community responses to environmental change. Ecologists have a tendency to interpret most ecological changes as somehow “bad” when in fact ecological change might be exactly what is required for ecosystems to thrive in an altered world.  I hope LCAB can minimize such value judgements, and thus provide a balanced view of past and future biodiversity gains and losses.

Research

Using historical data sources and contemporary field surveys, my students and I have quantified changes in plant community diversity and composition during recent decades and centuries. Testing explicit predictions about expected changes due to particular environmental drivers – e.g., upslope shifts in species distributions due to climate warming – allows us to draw inferences about likely underlying processes. I also maintain a strong interest in fundamental theory for explaining patterns in ecological communities. Collaborators and I conducted the first major meta-analysis on temporal biodiversity changes in local-scale plant communities, sparking a wave of interest and controversy over the scale-dependence of biodiversity change, with the core result (no temporal change in species richness, on average) confirmed in a group synthesis paper published in Science. My research is supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, including a team grant for the Canadian Airborne Biodiversity Observatory.

Publication highlights 

Vellend, M., Thompson, J.R., Danneyrolles, V. and Rousseu, F. (2021). Changes in landscape-scale tree biodiversity in the northeastern United States since European settlement. Global Ecology & Biogeography, 30, pp. 666-673.

Blowes, S. A., Supp, S. R., Antão, L. H., Bates, A., Bruelheide, H., Chase, J. M., Moyes, F., Magurran, A., McGill, B., Myers-Smith, I.H., Winter, M., Bjorkman, A.D., Bowler, D., Byrnes, J. E. K., Gonzalez, A., Hines, J., Isbell, F., Jones, H., Navarro, L.M., Thompson, P., Vellend, M., Waldock, C. and Dornelas, M. (2019) The geography of biodiversity change in marine and terrestrial assemblages. Science, 366, pp. 339–345.   

Vellend, M., Baeten, L., Becker-Scarpitta, A., Boucher-Lalonde, V., McCune, J.L., Messier, J., Myers-Smith, I.H. and Sax, D. (2017). Plant biodiversity change across scales during the Anthropocene. Annual Review of Plant Biology, 68, pp. 563-586.

Vellend, M. (2017). The Biodiversity Conservation Paradox. American Scientist, 105, pp. 94-101.

Vellend, M., Baeten, L., Myers-Smith, I.H., Elmendorf, S.C., Beauséjour, R., Brown, C.D., De Frenne, P., Verheyen, K. & Wipf, S. (2013). A global meta-analysis reveals no net change in local-scale plant biodiversity over time. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 110, pp. 19456–19459.

Funder

• The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. (NSERC)

Find out more about Mark's work