Laurion Isabelle

Biography

Professor Laurion has held postdoctoral fellowships in limnology at the University of Innsbruck , Austria, and in ecophysiology at the Rimouski Institute of Ocean Sciences . She became a professor at INRS in August 2002. Since then she has specialized in bio-optics and aquatic ecology. in general, she is interested in the effects of mixing dynamics and the transparency of water on the microbial food network and the biogeochemistry of lake systems. It often works at the interface between physical and biological processes, notably on the interaction between light, dissolved organic matter and plankton. His work focuses on the factors that control the proliferation of cyanobacteria in lakes and the development of tools to monitor them, including optical probes and remote sensing. They also address greenhouse gas emissions from aquatic environments in a context of climate change, including lakes formed by thawing permafrost in the far north,

Research Interest

Professor Laurion is particularly interested in the effects of climate change on lake mixing dynamics and water transparency and their interaction with the microbial food network (bacteria, phytoplankton, microzooplankton). In addition, his current work focuses on the effects of melting permafrost on the carbon cycle in the northern environment. Indeed, when permafrost melts, it forms ponds where biological activity can release carbon stored for millennia in the tundra to the atmosphere. They would then constitute genuine carbon reactors.