Brian McLaren
Associate Professor of Natural Resources Management; Chair, Honours BSc in Environmental Management · Lakehead University, Faculty of Natural Resources Management, Thunder Bay, Ontario
Brian McLaren teaches wildlife science at Lakehead University and is the researcher journalists call when Lake Superior's island caribou herds are in the news.
Worth knowing
He works the seam between wildlife science and resource policy, with standing research partnerships at the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, and Ecuador's Ministry of Environment. He can read what a caribou or moose population is actually doing and what forest management has to do with it.
Story
Brian studied biogeography in Toronto, then took a PhD in forest sciences at Michigan Technological University. Before academia he worked out of Gander, Newfoundland, where the question was moose: too many of them, and what their browsing was doing to balsam fir and forest recovery across the island. He joined Lakehead in August 2004 and has stayed with the animals that shape Canada's boreal forest. The long thread is the caribou of the Slate Islands in Lake Superior, held against observations reaching back to 1974, including what changed when wolves reached the islands. He now chairs Lakehead's Honours BSc in Environmental Management and supervises students in the MSc in Forestry and PhD in Forest Sciences programs.
Highlights
- PhD, Forest Sciences, Michigan Technological University, 1995
- BSc, Biogeography, University of Toronto, 1989
- 59 publications, over 1,800 citations
- Co-author, 2024 study on gene flow in southern boreal woodland caribou
- Chaired search for Lakehead's Research Chair on Caribou Populations in Ontario
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