Chantal Hutchison

Chantal Lana Hutchison is a PhD student in Dr. Catherine Potvin’s Neotropical Ecology Lab at McGill University. Her background is in Theoretical Physics with a Bachelor of Mathematics from the University of Waterloo and a MSc from the University of Waterloo and Perimeter Institute. She currently holds a scholarship from the NSERC CREATE scholarship program on Forest Complexity Modelling and is part of a joint research program between McGill University and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panamá.

The question driving her current research is: does trait diversity in tropical forests stabilize rates of carbon gain under climatic disturbances? Chantal aims to tease apart mechanisms which drive stability in forests to aid in reforestation designs that mitigate the negative impacts of climate change on carbon storage. She is developing new theoretical tools in combination with data from experimental planted forests in Panamá and Brazil to produce a model of forest carbon dynamics at multiple scales which can be used as a predictive tool in reforestation schemes.