Stephen Lougheed is a Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies at Queen’s University. He holds a B.Sc. in Molecular Biology & Genetics (Guelph), M.Sc. in Zoology (Guelph), and a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution (Western). He was Director of the Queen’s University Biological Station from 2011-2025 and was Baillie Chair of Conservation Biology over that same span. His research encompasses three broad themes: 1. quantifying the interacting evolutionary, geological, and climatic forces that shaped the evolutionary history and diversity of vertebrates; 2. quantifying human impacts on reptiles and amphibians of conservation concern – using genomics and geomatics; and 3. using environmental DNA to map species distributions and monitor species diversity over time and space. He has 40 years experiencing working on birds, amphibians and reptiles and other vertebrates in the Americas, particularly Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, with significant forays too into China, East Africa and Australia. Steve has supervised/is supervising >50 graduate students and 10 postdoctoral fellows, plus over 100 undergraduate thesis or mentorship students, who have gone into an astonishing array of professions. With his students and collaborators, he has published over 175 peer-reviewed articles, government reports, and book chapters, and has attracted over 28 million dollars in research funding to Queen’s University. He is a life-long naturalist, with a passion for birds and herpetofauna inspired by his maternal grandmother and mother and is a dedicated nature photographer and bibliophile.

Abstract:
The current global human population is 8.2 billion, having more than doubled since 1970. With this burgeoning population have come great pressures on natural systems. For example, worldwide approximately 340 million hectares of inland wetlands have been lost since 1700, largely due to conversion to agriculture. Between 2021 and 2024 alone, we lost over 500 million hectares of forest globally. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), an agency associated with the United Nations, has estimated that 1 million species are at risk of extinction, with freshwater habitats disproportionately impacted. At no other time in our collective history have we faced greater challenges in conserving our natural world. Central to addressing many of these issues is understanding and conserving habitat connectivity – from linking wintering, stop-over & breeding grounds of migratory species, through habitats that facilitate natural dispersal, to identifying regions that allow for future geographic range expansion as local climates shift. I will showcase multiple genetic and modeling research projects on fish, frogs, snakes, and polar bears from students and postdoctoral fellows in my lab. These collectively reveal the consequences of human activities – habitat conversion, introduced exotic species, climate change – on the distributions of Canadian species, but also provide some guidance on how we might mitigate these to conserve biodiversity for future generations.