Anson is a PhD student in the Forest Growth & Yield Lab at the University of Alberta, supervised by Dr. Robert Froese, and part of DIVERSE Theme 2. Anson’s path here runs from the subtropics to the boreal. For his master’s in Hong Kong, Anson used airborne LiDAR to measure taxonomic and functional diversity in dense, species-rich subtropical forests. Now he’s asking related questions in a very different forest. In his PhD, Anson is assessing and mapping functional diversity and redundancy across Canada’s forests. He is starting in Alberta, combining permanent sample plots with LiDAR to study how forests recover from harvest, wildfire, and mountain pine beetle outbreaks. What excites me Anson about DIVERSE is that it treats forests as a connected network rather than a set of isolated patches. It’s also built around functional redundancy. When several species can fill the same role, the forest can keep working if one of them struggles in a changing climate.