Erin Cameron
Erin Cameron has spent two decades mapping the spread and impacts of earthworms across the northern world, including Finland, Germany, and Canada’s boreal forest. She participated in several multinational assessments of global earthworm distributions, and also created the first landscape-level simulations of earthworm effects on carbon flux in Canada’s boreal forests. Her report, released in 2015, describes how models of leaf-litter dwelling earthworms—but not jumping worms specifically—reduced total carbon storage in the forest floor by nearly 50 percent after little more than a century, and magnified carbon loss from wildfires.
Now an associate professor in environmental science at Saint Mary’s University, in Halifax, Canada, Cameron runs the Conservation And Soil Ecology (CASE) lab, where she tracks the nascent spread of jumping worms in New Brunswick, and is piloting real-world studies of their effects on soil-carbon interactions. Meanwhile, Cameron is adapting to life on the coast of Canada, where she has added paddle boarding to her repertoire of favorite outdoors activities, alongside kayaking and cross-country skiing.
