Lenore Fahrig

Lenore Fahrig

Fellow: Awarded 2021
Field of Study: Geography and Environmental Studies

Competition: US & Canada

Lenore Fahrig is Chancellor’s Professor of Biology at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Lenore and her students study how human-caused landscape change – replacement of forest, wetland, and other natural habitats with roads, farmlands, and cities – affects wildlife and biodiversity. Study species include frogs, turtles, birds, bats, other mammals, insects, spiders, plants, and lichens. Lenore is best known for her work on habitat fragmentation, where she has shown that protecting many small patches of habitat is just as valuable for species conservation as protecting few large patches of the same total area. She is also known for her work showing the large impacts of roads and traffic on wildlife populations, especially on amphibians. In the mid-1980’s Lenore co-introduced the concept of habitat connectivity, which is now widely used in urban and regional planning.

Lenore has published over 250 scientific articles. She is a highly-cited researcher, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Guggenheim Fellow, recipient of the Miroslaw Romanowski medal for Environmental Science, and recipient of the Distinguished Landscape Ecologist Award from the North American Association for Landscape Ecology.

Photo Credit: Chris Roussakis

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