Daniel Gagnon is a graduate of the University of Ottawa (Honours BSc in biology), the Université de Montreal (MSc in biology), and the University of British Columbia (PhD in botany). He joins the University of Regina after a 29-year career at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal, where he taught a wide range of undergraduate courses and trained over 60 graduate students. He has received research funding from NSERC, FQRNT, provincial and federal ministries of environment, forest resources and agriculture, regional governmental agencies, and World Wildlife Fund Canada. He has co-authored over 60 scientific articles, 70 reports, and 100 conference presentations. He has given many public lectures, and published articles for the general public about ecology and the environment, including 86 weekly newspaper columns in Montreal's La Presse.
Dr Gagnon has considerable international experience, particularly in Ecuador and in the United States. Co-Editor in Chief of Ecoscience, the foremost ecology journal in Canada, he has served on several governmental advisory committees and boards of directors of non-governmental organizations.
Over a period of nine years he directed four large graduate programs in environmental sciences and biology. He was the first Director of Research at the Montreal Biodeme, a large public education institution that presents ecosystem reproductions, combining aspects of a zoo, an aquarium and a botanical garden. Dr Gagnon is one of four founding members of a forest ecology research group which grew over a period of two decades into the Centre d'etude de la foret, a provincially funded research centre with 53 researchers from 10 Quebec universities, and several associate researchers from other provinces. With two other founding trustees, he created the Eastern Townships Forest Research Trust (2007), the goals of which are to support research, student training and knowledge transfer on forest conservation, restoration, and sustainable management.
With his students, Dr Gagnon has studied the population dynamics of forest understory plants. Their results have led to provincial and federal conservation designations for many species. They were also the first to do research on reforestation with valuable hardwood trees in Quebec. With former PhD students Benoit Truax and Julien Fortier, he is currently involved in a million-dollar project to investigate the carbon sequestration potential of hybrid poplar agroforestry plantations.
Dr. Gagnon served on the PIMS Board of Directors from 2012-2016
