2023 IBioS Student Fellow
Contact Details
vjones97@mail.ubc.ca
My name is Vanessa Jones, and I am a PhD student in the Indigenous Ecology Lab in the Faculty of Forestry, supervised by Dr. Jennifer Grenz. After growing up in Abbotsford, BC with a love of nature and the outdoors, I began my research journey as an undergraduate student at Trinity Western University in Langley studying biology. I had the opportunity to study seed characteristics of an invasive plant species, knotweed, while completing my BSc thesis, which piqued my interest in plants. This led me to the Department of Land and Food Systems here at UBC where I completed my MSc in Plant Science this past December. During my MSc, I studied the relationship between knotweed plants, their management with herbicides, and the soil microbial community. My desire to learn more about the plant-soil interactions taking place in different ecosystems has led me to my current PhD position, which I started this past January. My PhD project aims to characterize the soil microbial community of Indigenous forest gardens, which are resilient, previously human-shaped ecosystems that have been left untended since colonization, but remain as residual gardens. As Indigenous communities work to reclaim the prominence of forest gardens in their food systems, interest is growing to better understand how their management builds benefits including food security, soil health, and biodiversity.