Christian Messier, FRSC

Dr. Christian Messier is a professor of Forest Ecology and Urban Forestry at the Université du Québec en Outaouais (UQO) and at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). He is Scientific Director at Institut des sciences de la forêt tempérée (ISFORT) at UQO. He was the founding director of the Centre of Forest Research. From 2002 to 2010, he was a co-leader of the Sustainable Forest Management Network, a national network of more than 150 researchers in various fields related to forest management.

Dr. Messier obtained his PhD from the University of British Columbia and completed his post-doc at the University of Helsinki in Finland. His research interests are wide, ranging from the basic understanding of tree growth and death, forest community and ecosystem functioning to decision-making tools to better manage and conserve natural and urban forests. In 2005, Dr. Messier started an ambitious research project to manage a large forest unit based on the principle of functional zoning in central Quebec.

Dr. Messier has established a worldwide network of diversity experimental tree plantation (IDENT) to study the relationships between tree diversity and ecosystem functioning with sites in Canada, US, Germany and Italy. He has published more than 300 referee papers, reports, book chapters and books. He has held an industrial-NSERC research Chair on tree growth since 2010 and a Canada Research Chair on the resilience of managed forest to global change since 2017.

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