Linking Environmental Stressors to Health
Environmental stressors have long played a broad role in shaping population health. However, environmental stressors are increasing in today’s rapidly-changing world. Innovative new tools are needed to improve understanding of how people respond to environmental stress.
Dr. Oliver Love, Canada Research Chair in Integrative Ecology, is exploring the common physiological stress pathways that humans share with many other species, including birds from Polar and temperate environments. He aims to determine how and why environmental stressors affect the wellbeing of a diversity of species.
The answers Love finds will help ecological, environmental and medical researchers better understand how environmental stressors as seemingly diverse as climate change, human-induced habitat destruction and even maternal stress are linked via their ability to alter the productivity of individuals and population health.
Love’s research is also increasing understanding of how and why organisms have evolved to match their physiological responses to environmental change. His findings will allow for better predictions of which individuals, populations or species are most at-risk from further human-induced changes to the world’s ecosystems.
Love’s research will significantly improve our understanding of the origins of many stress-induced diseases.