Yan Boulanger

Biography:

I grew up in a small village of the Bas-Saint-Laurent, Québec where I spent days in the fields and forests, hunting butterflies and moths with the perfect mix of marine and forest aromas. Oddly, I was also interested to weather and climate. Freaky for a kid… That was at that time I heard a great entomologist quoting Saint-Augustine: “He who loses himself in his passion is less lost than he who loses his passion”.  So, with this motto in my head, that was quite a logical step for me to complete my graduate studies in biology at the Université du Québec à Rimouski. During this period, I became interested in natural disturbances, notably in wildland fires, as my research projects were focusing on the impact of fire on saproxylic species and on wood decomposition. Alongside, I also became interested in dendrochronology, enough to develop a private laboratory using this method to date old houses in the Quebec province. In order to kill two birds with one stone, samples from these contracts were used to reconstruct spruce budworm outbreaks. Then, as a research scientist at the Canadian Forest Service since 2013, I coupled my fire research interests with my old weather/climate hobby to project future natural disturbance regimes and their impact on forest landscapes according to climate change. Now, I’m more deeply exploring my weather interests in my work by using weather surveillance radar to characterize mass exodus spruce budworm flights. Like Raoul Duguay would say: “Tout est dans tout!”. Although I’m mostly working in front of a computer nowadays, I use to spend a lot of my spare time in the forest, running in trails.