Dr. Isabelle Laurion obtained her B.Sc. from the Université de Montréal (Canada) in physics and biology, her master in oceanography from the Université du Québec à Rimouski (Canada) and her PhD in biology from the Université Laval. She followed with postdoctoral studies in limnology at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) and in ecophysiology at the Institut des Sciences de la Mer de Rimouski (Canada).
Isabelle Laurion has been interested in polar and subpolar regions since 1991. She started to work on marine microbial food web dynamics in the Arctic where she studied the shift in the grazing behaviour of heterotrophic nanoflagellates at the ice-water interface during spring. Her research underlined the remarkable consequences of small change in dissolved organic matter on the exposure of aquatic organisms to UV radiation in subarctic and alpine lakes and the importance to consider taxonomic composition when estimating the phytoplankton sensitivity to UV. She then studied the photoprotection mechanisms used by phytoplankton in alpine lakes and by marine bloom-forming dinoflagellates.
In 2004, her lab team started to work on thermokarst ponds, a fascinating system growing in importance with the thawing of permafrost. Recently, high methane bubbling from Siberia ponds has been suggested as a positive feedback mechanism to climate warming. Yet they have studied their limnological properties and how the dissolved organic matter mobilized in ponds is available to microbial degradation and sunlight photolysis. The ponds were particularly rich in microbes and in most cases they were supersaturated in carbon dioxide and methane, so at least part of the year they are a carbon source to the atmosphere. She is greatly interested in historical aspects of these ponds, their potential to act as a carbon reactor, their microbial diversity and the development of optical tools to survey these systems from space.
Isabelle Laurion
Professeure
Université du Québec
Institut national de la recherche scientifique
Eau, Terre et Environnement
490, rue de la Couronne
Québec (Québec) G1K 9A9
Phone: (418) 654-2694
Fax: (418) 654-2600
