>> Welcome to Kurt Illerbrun's website! I'm currently doing my PhD in Ecology at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada, under the supervision of Dr Jens Roland. My research looks at the effects of rising tree line on the plants and insects of an alpine meadow community in the Canadian Rockies. On this page you'll find information about my current project and past work, various musings on science, and a few other items besides. I've tried to keep things accessible to as wide an audience as possible by avoiding technical terminology wherever I can—so please poke around, and enjoy.
| Parnassian larva enjoying lunch... | Rising tree line in the Rockies...
Rising tree line poses a significant threat to the health of alpine meadows in the Canadian Rockies and around the world. The reason for this is superficially simple: as global temperatures slowly rise and allow trees to grow at ever higher elevations, the trees eventually encroach into alpine meadows, which naturally occur just above tree line. This reduces overall meadow area, and more importantly for species like the Rocky Mountain Parnassian butterfly, it fragments the meadow that remains. Of course the situation is more complicated than this. Why, for instance, don't the alpine meadows move uphill along with the trees, maintaining the relative status quo? And what's so special about alpine ecosystems in the first place? Like so many issues in Ecology, the answers show how the seemingly unrelated elements of our world are really connected. More... |
>> New for Spring 2012: lots of analysis!
After another field season at the BGS, I’m back in Edmonton making sense of all the data we collected during the summer. There’s lots to do: this year we collected hundreds of plant samples that now need to be prepared and analyzed to see if their nutritional value varies in response to a variety of factors, like snow cover and prior feeding damage. The hope is that this sheds some light on why our caterpillars like to eat some host plants and not others, even though they look the same to us. We also completed a side project looking at variation in host plants from year to year, which should give us a sense of what, if any, impact caterpillars have on their host plants. Teasing out the details of the close relationship caterpillars have with their host plants remains the overall goal.
Outside of the academic world, I participated in BioARTCAMP, a collaborative project between bio-artists and scientists that aimed to create a portable bioart laboratory in the Rockies--it was a unique experience that raised some interesting questions about our perception of science. Check out the YouTube video for a sense of what went on.
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