This text is part of the special Feminine Leadership notebook
At the foot of the boreal forest lies a thick carpet of apple green moss teeming with life. It is this little-known microcosm that the UQAT professor explores. Last December, the professor at the Forest Research Institute of the University of Quebec in Abitibi-Témiscamingue (UQAT) became the first Canadian to receive the Spruce Prize from the International Association of Bryologists for her exceptional contribution to moss biology during his first 25 years of career.
“The bryophytes are really very beautiful. Once you start looking at them under the microscope, you discover another world, which was hidden before our eyes,” says Nicole Fenton with a big smile. Including mosses and sphagnum moss, bryophytes are non-vascularized plants constituting the most primitive group among land plants. They cover the peat bogs and undergrowth of the boreal forest, they climb on trunks and rocks in deciduous forests. Above all, they play many ecological roles.
“It’s almost another little forest under the forest,” explains the researcher. They have an architecture of their own, there are lots of things that grow, cyanobacteria which fix nitrogen in the air, fungi which decompose them, springtails, daphnia (small crustaceans), spiders which eat these invertebrates, slugs, etc. »
Not only do bryophytes host beautiful biodiversity on a microscopic scale, but they also constitute a buffer zone between the soil and the atmosphere, explains Mme Fenton. They behave, in a way, like sponges, allowing them to absorb excess precipitation and irrigate the soil over longer periods. They also constitute buffer zones to regulate fluctuations in air temperature. Finally, they are small carbon sinks allowing organic matter to be effectively captured.
“It can slow down the cycles [de carbone, par exemple]which can go faster and faster with climate change, particularly with extreme events, such as precipitation or droughts,” estimates the researcher.
Bridging the knowledge gap
If in certain countries, such as Sweden, there are numerous bryologists, the experts on bryophytes in Canada can be counted on the fingers of both hands, calculates Nicole Fenton. The result: there is a large gap in knowledge about this important group of plants.
“One of the big gaps is that we don’t know their distribution very well,” underlines the researcher, who specializes in the ecology of bryophytes. I am on the COSEWIC committee [Comité sur la situation des espèces en péril au Canada]and we cannot know which species are potentially endangered, but we must first identify the limiting factors [leur croissance] to know the risk factors [pour leur survie]. »
Mme Fenton is leading several projects concerning the ecology of bryophytes. It attempts to understand, for example, how disturbances or forest types can vary the abundance of certain species in the landscape. Other projects are more applied, she explains, and concern the effects of disturbances, such as forest fires or epidemics of insect pests, on bryophytes. The knowledge acquired will make it possible to better understand the functions of bryophytes and how they can play a role in forest management.
To date, Nicole Fenton has supervised more than thirty master’s, doctoral and postdoctoral candidates. She has participated in the writing of more than a hundred scientific articles on the subject, as well as several book chapters. For her, awareness remains very important.
“If bryophytes could have a tenth of the visibility of caribou, I would be happy! exclaims the researcher. We have this immense expanse of boreal forest that is relatively undisturbed compared to elsewhere. I encourage everyone to get outside. I would like people to realize that we have this wealth! »
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