Ecologist by day, nature photographer and artist by other days, Emma has been photographing landscapes, wildlife, and everything in between since she was 11. Her hobby was fostered by the vibrant and lush temperate rainforest surrounding her home in North Vancouver. Rather than obsessing over technical skills, she prefers to use photography as a creative outlet to explore ecological relationships. It has cultivated her curiosity in and an appreciation for the natural world, ultimately propelling her to study environmental sciences.
On most days, she’s a Master’s student in Botany at the University of British Columbia using small aquatic plants to study ecological-evolutionary dynamics of species competition. Her research will have implications for community assembly in ecosystems facing novel interactions through invasion from alien species and species shifting distributions with climate change. In ongoing research, she has also modelled the distributions of two at-risk species of moss and is working to determine how species distribution modelling could improve the assessment of species-at-risk in Canada with climate change.
More recently, she has combined her photographic and biological (primarily botanical) interests by avidly submitting species observations to iNaturalist. She hopes that both her future research in ecology / conservation and nature photography can synergistically have a positive impact on the future of biodiversity conservation in Canada.
