We are the Biodiversity of Urban Green Spaces (BUGS) Lab in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
As a research lab we are interested in how to conserve biodiversity in urban environments, and how to harness biodiversity in green infrastructure to promote human well-being and connection to nature. We strive to balance trade-offs and promote synergies in urban planning to support people and nature.
We mainly study interactions between insects, plants, and people, and across a range of urban impacted environments - from remnant natural areas to constructed green infrastructure such as green roofs. We especially love wild bees and the flowers they visit, and so pollination ecology and pollinator diversity and the influence of anthropogenic disturbance is a major theme in our research. Broadly, our work also encompasses invasion biology, wild bee taxonomy, biogeography, landscape architecture, horticulture, as well as computational ecology and machine learning.