Marie-Josée Fortin


Marie-Josée Fortin is an Ecologist and Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. Fortin holds the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Spatial Ecology at the University of Toronto. In 2016, she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Fortin completed her BSc and her MSc at the Université de Montréal. In 1992 she received a PhD from the State University of New York, where she was Robert Sokal's last doctoral student. She then went on to do a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Université Laval.
Fortin focuses her current research on four subject areas: spatial ecology, spatial and landscape statistics, conservation, as well as disturbance ecology. These subjects include disciplines such as spatially-explicit modeling, spatial epidemiology, forest ecology, network theory, landscape genetics and geography. This research focuses on the maintenance of biodiversity within ecosystems and appropriate conservation strategies for species affected by land use and climate change. This includes the analyses of how environmental factors and ecological processes affect the movement, persistence, and range dynamics of species at the landscape and geographical range in both forested and aquatic environments.

Publications

Since 1987, Fortin has contributed to a large number of publications in books as well as scientific journals involving ecology and conservation. This includes over 160 peer-reviewed papers and the co-authoring of the book Spatial Analysis: A Guide for Ecologists, which included the 1st and 2nd editions published in 2005 and 2014.

Select awards and honours