Carissa Brown

Dr. Carissa Brown is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Memorial University and has 18 years experience conducting experimental and observational studies in Canadian forest ecosystems. C. Brown is the lead of the Northern EDGE Lab, where her research group focuses on the impact of climate change on plant species across their distributions. She does this primarily in forest ecosystems, studying both understory plant and tree populations and communities, typically at the edge of their range. She combines field experimentation and observational studies to answer questions related to biodiversity and land-use change, disturbance, abiotic characteristics, and biotic interactions, analyzing these data using tools such as mixed-effect modeling, Bayesian approaches, and multivariate statistics. Her ongoing research programs include a large-scale field experiment distributed across Newfoundland testing the ability of native temperate tree species of eastern North America to expand their distributions into boreal forest stands under climate change. Previous research in Canada’s subarctic treeline has involved propagating and planting out tree seedlings across a natural field experiment. Her research funding and collaborations span Federal (NSERC, Parks Canada), Provincial (Research and Development Corporation of Newfoundland and Labrador), and international (International Arctic Science Committee) bodies. She has published 21 peer-reviewed scientific articles in journals ranging from Canadian Journal of Forest Research to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. C. Brown’s research has been featured in the journals Nature and Science, and she has been a guest on regional CBC radio programs as well as the national science program ‘Quirks and Quarks’.