Area of Expertise:
Dr. Julia Baum is an Associate Professor and head of the Baum Lab at the University of Victoria. Research in the Baum Lab is motivated by a fundamental desire to understand how human impacts are changing our oceans. Lab members are currently investigating how climate change and other anthropogenic stressors are altering the diversity, structure, and resilience of marine ecosystems.
Lab members focus primarily on tropical coral reefs, and do so using a suite of approaches including statistical models of large observational data sets, field observations and experiments, molecular analyses and bioinformatics, stable isotope analyses, interviews, and meta-analyses. Their research spans across broad temporal and spatial scales, incorporates principles from population, community and ecosystem ecology, conservation science, and fisheries science and is highly collaborative.
Members are committed to open science, enhancing equity in science, and outreach to the public and policy-makers. The overarching goal is to make scientific discoveries that advance understanding of oceanic ecosystems, and inform and inspire effective solutions for their conservation.
Julia leads the Fraser River Estuary Resilience project with Dr Laura Kehoe and Dr Tara Martin. This project will identify the management actions required to abate the key threats to the Fraser River Estuary (FRE) in order to ensure its long-term resilience. Research effort to date in the FRE has focused on identifying its natural assets and their threats. This project will develop techniques in conservation decision science to identify the most effective and at the same time, least costly management actions needed to ensure the long-term resilience of the FRE. This project will be carried out in close collaboration with many key stakeholders and organizations including the Pacific Salmon Foundation (PSF), Raincoast Conservation Foundation, Environment Canada, and Fisheries and Oceans Canada.This project is funded by MEOPAR (http://meopar.ca, the Marine Environmental Observation Prediction and Response Network).
Select Presentation(s) / Publication(s):
Chalifour, Lia; Scott, David; MacDuffee, Misty; Dower, John; and Baum, Julia, “Juvenile Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) residency and early growth in the lower Fraser River estuary” (2018). Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference. 122. https://cedar.wwu.edu/ssec/2018ssec/allsessions/122
Kehoe, Laura; Lund, Jessie; Baum, Julia; Chalifour, Lia; and Martin, Tara, “Prioritizing management actions for the Fraser River estuary” (2018). Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference. 503.
https://cedar.wwu.edu/ssec/2018ssec/allsessions/503
Bard, Shannon; Eger, Aaron; and Baum, Julia, “If historic marine pollution ceases, will the natural intertidal community return? How exposure to and release from pollution disturbance shapes rocky intertidal communities in the Salish Sea” (2018). Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference. 157.
https://cedar.wwu.edu/ssec/2018ssec/allsessions/157
Magel, J.M.T., J.H.R. Burns, R.D. Gates and J.K. Baum. 2018. Effects of bleaching-associated mass coral mortality on reef structural complexity across a gradient of local disturbance. Scientific Reports.
Claar, D.C., L. Szostek, J.M. McDevitt-Irwin, J.J. Schanze and J.K. Baum. 2018. Global patterns and impacts of El Niño events on coral reefs: A meta-analysis. PLoS ONE 13(2): e0190957; doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0190957.
Iacarella, J., E. Adamczyk, D. Bowen, L. Chalifour, A. Eger, W. Heath, S. Helms, M. Hessing-Lewis, B.P.V. Hunt, A. MacInnis, M. O’Connor, C.L.K. Robinson, J. Yakimishyn and J.K. Baum. 2018. Anthropogenic disturbance homogenizes seagrass fish communities. Online early: Global Change Biology 1-15 Supp Mat 1, 2.
Iacarella, Josephine C.; Baum, Julia K.; ” Establishing a BC eelgrass monitoring network for assessment of fish diversity along environmental and human disturbance gradients” (2016). Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference. 35.
https://cedar.wwu.edu/ssec/2016ssec/habitat/35/
