With a background in environmental sciences, Gabrielle’s interest in Northern landscapes involves the interactions between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. While she has always been drawn to the North, her undergraduate thesis work at the University of Western Ontario provided an opportunity to bridge her interests in freshwater ecosystems and northern landscapes. In this project, she characterized dissolved organic matter from rivers in the Old Crow Flats, Yukon to better understand the land-water interactions influenced by permafrost thaw. This experience led Gabrielle to her current MSc research, supervised by Dr. Suzanne Tank at the University of Alberta. She is looking at the potential of mineral-organic interactions, driven by permafrost thaw, to affect the bioavailability of organic carbon across the western Canadian Arctic.
Over the past few years, Gabrielle has been fortunate to participate in several fieldwork campaigns in the Northwest Territories, spending time in Yellowknife, Norman Wells, Fort McPherson, Inuvik, and on the land. Following the completion of her MSc research, she hopes to continue to work in the North, particularly on biogeochemistry in northern freshwater ecosystems.
As a trainee in the NSERC CREATE LEAP program, Gabrielle’s goals are to strengthen her network of Northern colleagues and to further develop an interdisciplinary perspective on Northern issues.
