Thousands of kilometres separate McGill’s Gault Nature Reserve at Mont Saint-Hilaire, the Peruvian Amazon rainforest and the woodlands of Belgium. But thanks to a new international initiative, Gault is now directly connected to both. Through a global field station partnership program, Gault has been matched with sister field stations in Peru and Belgium, blazing new trails in collaborative science, education and outreach.
David Maneli, Associate Director, Gault Nature Reserve, helped launch the field station matching program to foster cross-border projects and collaboration. Maneli also serves as Chair of the International Committee of the Organization of Biological Field Stations (OBFS), a network of field stations and marine labs around the globe.
“It’s great to share ideas and best practices with colleagues from around the world,” Maneli said. “Very often, issues of structure and governance are quite different, but we share many of the same core values: to protect, preserve and learn from the natural world.”
Motion-activated cameras capture images of wildlife
In its partnership with Peru’s Alliance for a Sustainable Amazon – Finca Las Piedras and Belgium’s Field Research Centre of UHasselt (Hasselt University), Gault is leading a project on biodiversity monitoring using camera traps. Each site has installed motion-activated cameras to capture images and videos of wildlife. These photos and videos are uploaded to a shared platform that uses artificial intelligence to identify species and record locations, helping to build a growing biodiversity database. Maneli says the plan is to make the database accessible to the public. In the meantime, researchers can gain access to long-term data and students can engage in real-world ecological monitoring.
After more than a year of collaboration, the project has already sparked exchanges, with researchers visiting each other’s stations to learn about local ecosystems, best practices and outreach activities.
The team will present the project at the OBFS conference in Colorado in September, encouraging other field stations to adopt similar low-cost, scalable tools for long-term monitoring.
“It’s a powerful example of how local science can contribute to global understanding,” said Maneli.
Anja Geitmann, McGill’s Vice-President (Global Engagement), said that such initiatives show that the internationalization of research is not confined to the exchange of data and scientists meeting at conferences, but also involves ongoing institutional collaborations.
“Networks like the one Gault established with Belgium and Peru can build capacity that goes far beyond that of a single institution. For graduate students, this offers tremendous opportunities for mobility where they transfer their skills and broaden the reach of their research – from the Canadian temperate forest to the Amazon,” Geitmann said
A foundation in academic research
As its international role grows, Gault remains committed to its academic mission. Affiliated with McGill’s Faculty of Science, the reserve supports field courses, graduate and undergraduate research and student-led projects. In 2024, Gault hosted 43 research projects, making it one of Quebec’s most active natural science research sites.
To further this mission, the Gault Research Awards provide up to $10,000 in funding for research at Gault or the Gault-run Wilder and Helen Penfield Nature Conservancy, located on Lake Memphrémagog. These awards help students and researchers undertake field-based work that contributes to ecological understanding and conservation.
One of Gault’s strengths is its ability to support long-term ecological monitoring. With a dedicated year-round team, the reserve can maintain data sets spanning decades – on forest health, wildlife populations and climate shifts – providing a rare resource in a world where research is often limited to short-term grant cycles.
“These are golden years for Gault,” said Maneli. We have huge support from the Faculty of Science, and our team is dynamic and engaged. When people are happy and supported, it’s easy to be productive.”