Welcome Chelsea J. Little - new SE

Submitted by editor on 23 September 2024.

We are happy to welcome Dr Chelsea J. Little, Associate Professor at the School of Environmental Science & Department of Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada, to Oikos Editorial Board. To know more about her, read our interview below and visit her webpage https://littleecologygroup.ca/

What's your main research focus at the moment?

My research uses fieldwork, synthesis, and theory to examine the structure and function of ecological communities in space. I always have a hard time answering “what is your main focus?" because I am interested in so many things in ecology and evolution, and my research isn’t focused around a single type of ecosystem or taxonomic group! I would say my research program has three main parts at the moment. One is working on community assembly and priority effects, that is, whether and how the order that different species arrive to an ecosystem affects their performance and, ultimately, the community composition. I’m doing this primarily with data synthesis at the moment, collaborating with a large number of wonderful people. The second part is examining how ecosystem functioning and processes vary in space, and how they are spatially linked - whether this is because of patterns of spatial autocorrelation in abiotic conditions, in biological communities, or due to connections among ecosystems. Right now my students and I are using both simulations and field data to explore this idea. And the third is a more applied focus, looking at how humans impact communities and ecosystem processes through climate change, agriculture, transportation, and recreation. 

Can you describe your research career?

I did a bachelors thesis, which I have to say was not very good. Anyway…. After my bachelors I worked several research jobs before deciding that I should go to graduate school. I had just read “The Beak of the Finch” and was fascinated by evolutionary ecology. I did the Erasmus Mundus Masters in Evolutionary Biology, which is a joint program between Uppsala University, University of Montpellier, Ludwig Maximilians University, and Groningen University, where I graduated in 2014. As part of this I researched (in a very hot insect lab) the evolution of facultative parthenogenesis in locusts before realizing that I wanted my research to still involve fieldwork, especially in the mountains if possible. I did some climate change research in the Svalbard and Sweden for my thesis, as part of the International Tundra Experiment. In my PhD, I switched ecosystems and researched freshwater community ecology, and specifically biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, at the University of Zurich and Eawag under the supervision of Dr. Florian Altermatt. Since then, I did a short postdoc at the University of British Columbia with Dr. Rachel Germain, where I tried to improve my understanding of coexistence theory, and then was hired as an Assistant Professor in the School of Environmental Science at Simon Fraser University in 2021.
In my current research program, I’m involved both in freshwater ecology and tundra ecology, and I’m very happy with this. I’m also getting into wildlife ecology.

How come that you became a scientist in ecology?

I was really lucky to be hired as a Research Assistant after the first year of my bachelors, and work at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado, USA, doing pollination ecology fieldwork with Dr. Rebecca Irwin. I hadn’t realized that ecology was a career path or fieldwork was something you could get paid to do. But there I was, sitting in a subalpine meadow watching bumblebees fly around among beautiful wildflowers. From then on, I wanted to be an ecologist! Having said that, I didn’t have much of a career plan and I certainly didn’t envision then that I would be a university professor. I simply took a series of opportunities that seemed interesting at the time. I’ve worked hard, but I feel immensely privileged that these opportunities came my way.

What do you do when you're not working?

 spend a lot of time outside - trail running, hiking, and cross-country skiing. I’m also a big fan of crime novels, and enjoy cooking. I just bought two beautiful new cookbooks to try to incentivize myself to continue cooking good meals as the fall teaching semester gets more crazy.

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