Isabelle M. Côté,

Department of Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University

Isabelle Côté is a professor of Marine Ecology in the Department of Biological Sciences at Simon Fraser University.  Her interests in marine ecology and conservation are broad.  Her group pioneered the use of meta-analyses of large datasets to reconstruct trajectories of ecological change on coral reefs, measure the global effectiveness of marine protected areas (MPAs) in protecting fish and their habitats and assess the impacts of multiple stressors on natural ecosystems.  Her recent research focus has been on marine invasive species – measuring their impacts, predicting their spread and devising the best ways to control them. She is now turning her attention towards the usefulness and limitations of functional approaches to understanding high-biodiversity ecosystems.  Although much of her work is on tropical habitats, she is actively involved in subtidal ecological research on the coast of British Columbia,  including this CHONe project on eelgrass resilience. She was part of the core group of experts advising Parks Canada on National Marine Conservation Areas and was on the Royal Society of Canada panel on ocean climate change and marine biodiversity.  She is passionate about science communication, particularly relating to ocean discovery, and is the Vice-President of the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution. She was awarded the Marsh Award for Conservation Biology of the Zoological Society of London in 2009, for contributions of fundamental science to the conservation of animal species and habitats, and selected as a Leopold Leadership Fellow in 2015.