Professor Sylvie de Blois received a PhD in biology from the Université de Montreal in 2001. She is an Associate Professor of ecology at the Department of Plant Science and the School of Environment of McGill University. She is also the Director of the McGill School of Environment, an interdisciplinary unit involving Science, Arts, Agricultural and Environmental Science, Law, and Management at McGill. She was an invited scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia and at the engineering School ‘École des Mines de Nantes’ in France. She is a member of the Quebec Center for Biodiversity Science and of the Ecological Society of America, and a scientific advisor on the European funded programme AGREENSKILLS aimed at supporting the international mobility of emergent researchers. Her research focuses on plant ecology, landscape ecology, climate change, biological invasion, and biodiversity science. She has co-authored an award-winning book on the impact of climate change on Quebec biodiversity.

The major reshuffling of species distribution and abundance predicted by global change models in this century is expected to have unprecedented impacts on biodiversity and natural resources. Yet, the ability to predict the combined effect of landscape changes and rapid warming on the realized niches of species remains remarkably limited. Understanding how plants respond to these changes is important as plants structure habitats, provide resources to other species, and regulate biogeochemical – including carbon – flows. Fundamentally, this requires developing and testing predictions of how key biological processes, such as reproduction, dispersal, and establishment - which determine local persistence and potential for species movement – relate to landscape, regional, and continental patterns of plant distribution and assemblages. For ecologists and conservation specialists, there is, in particular, an urgent need to reconcile the time scale and spatial extent of these biological processes with those required to keep up with the magnitude and speed of environmental changes. Lessons from biological invasion can be informative in this context as they underscore the potential for rapid adaptive responses from species, including climatic niche shifts, in facilitating species migration and range expansion. Professor deBlois's research investigates the interrelations between the environment, landscape structure, and key biological processes that determine plant population and community persistence. It aims to develop an understanding of these interrelations from local to sub-continental scales, combining concepts and approaches from plant biology, landscape ecology, invasion ecology, and global change biology. Findings are relevant for biodiversity conservation both within and outside nature reserves, corridor function, species migration, range dynamics, the control of invasive plants, and sustainable forest and agricultural landscape management.