Mary O’Connor

Area of Expertise:

Dr. May O’Connor’s long-term research objective is to determine the adaptive capacity of biodiversity and ecosystem function in changing environments. She and her students draw on unifying principles from diverse ecological disciplines to predict and explain how organisms, communities and ecosystems persist in changing environments. They document biodiversity in pristine and heavily impacted coastal marine seagrass meadows, and conduct experiments to find the limits of possible ecological responses to warming, and develop theoretical and conceptual approaches to relate their observations to changes at larger and smaller scales.  They use synthesis of data and theory, together with lab and field experiments to test critical assumptions and hypotheses to advance general knowledge about ecological change.

In the UBC O’Connor lab they want to understand what drives variation in ecosystem structure and function to better understand the ecological impacts of climate change and habitat modification, and to explore how conservation efforts can be most effective given natural environmental changes.

The O’Connor Lab research includes:

• Exploring seagrass ecosystems in British Columbia
• Experimentally warming aquatic ecosystems
• Understanding how temperature affects species interactions and ecosystem processes
• Understanding relationships between marine ecological structure and human seafood-derived nutrition

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