Catherine Shier

City of Edmonton

Wildlife must adapt to human presence to survive in the Anthropocene, so it is critical to understand species responses to humans in different contexts. We used camera trapping as a lens to view mammal responses to changes in human activity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Across 163 species sampled in 102 projects around the world, changes in the amo...

Human-driven environmental changes shape ecological communities from local to global scales. Within cities, landscape-scale patterns and processes and species characteristics generally drive local-scale wildlife diversity. However, cities differ in their structure, species pools, geographies and histories, calling into question the extent to which...

Here we provide one of the first detailed studies of lichen and allied fungi diversity in a continental North American city (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada), including an annotated checklist, images of all species, dichotomous keys, and local distribution maps. Edmonton is the northernmost city in North America with a population of over one million, and...

Urban biodiversity provides critical ecosystem services and is a key component to environmentally and socially sustainable cities. However, biodiversity varies greatly within and among cities, leading to human communities with changing and unequal experiences with nature. The "luxury effect," a hypothesis that predicts a positive correlation betwee...

The biodiversity hypothesis that contact with natural environments (e.g. native vegetation) and biodiversity, through the influence of environmental microbes, may be beneficial for human commensal microbiota has been insufficiently tested. We aimed to study the association between living near natural environments in the urban context, and gut micro...

Historic fur returns from Hudson's Bay Company posts in northwestern Canada reveal periodic oscillations in mink (Neovision vision) harvests lagging 2–3 years behind oscillations in muskrat (Ondatra zibethicus) harvests, as would be expected in a predator-prey interaction. Toward central and eastern Canada, the strength of the interaction between t...