Entomological Society of Canada – C. Gordon Hewitt Award

Dr. Zoë Lindo is the 2019 recipient of the Entomological Society of Canada’s C. Gordon Hewitt Award. This award is given annually to an individual judged to have made an outstanding contribution to entomology in Canada, and who received their PhD within the preceding 12 years.

Dr. Lindo is a remarkable early career scholar with an amazing 56 publications, with seven more submitted, and an h-index of 19. She is an Associate Professor in the Biology Department at the University of Western Ontario. She is the PI or collaborator in grants worth $2.6 million. She already has a top international reputation and is a major player in research in several ecosystems and is breaking new ground continuously.

Dr. Lindo works primarily on soil arthropods and their role in biodiversity and ecosystem function. Dr. Lindo uses soil arthropods as models for understanding biodiversity and ecosystem function, as soils are a non-renewable resource that contain the majority of the world’s biodiversity and perform important functions such as decomposition and nutrient cycling. She combines large-scale field observations, lab, greenhouse, and field-scale experimental manipulations, together with theoretical approaches, to understand how global environmental changes will impact soil biodiversity and function.

Dr. Lindo’s research has broken new ground in elucidating the processes which generate and maintain patterns of soil biodiversity and examining how changes in biodiversity and ecosystem processes feedback on one another. For instance, Dr. Lindo’s early research includes an innovative research program exploring arthropod biodiversity in the canopy of ancient coastal temperate rainforests that resulted in 14 peer-reviewed published works. This work highlighted the unique biodiversity of forest canopies and identified wind-dispersal as a key element in shaping these ecological communities. It was also more than usually challenging as it involved climbing into the 36 m ancient canopy and devising a series of vertical and horizontal litter and suspended soil experiments. She then moved into the boreal peatlands and introduced the concept of the Bryosphere, an essential component of the boreal ecosystem. She has explored the effects of climate change on decomposition, nutrient dynamics and community structure on this system. She is especially proud of her taxonomic work as facilitating the discovery and description of new species in the field of Acarology. Dr. Lindo is recognized as a world-leading expert in the Acarine suborder Oribatida, and the expert on the oribatid family Peloppiidae; she co teaches Oribatida at the Acarology Summer Program of the Ohio State University/University of Arkansas.

She has supervised 16 graduate students, two post-docs and nine honours students, and is a Subject Editor of The Canadian Entomologist, and Editor-in-Chief for Pedobiologia. She runs a large and vibrant lab and publishes with her students regularly. She is involved in a broad range of national and international collaborations.