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[Parks Canada beaver logo]
[title: parkscanada.gc.ca]

[text on screen: Chantal Ouimet is an ecologist with Parks Canada.]

[Chantal Ouimet talks to us as she and a student assemble a weather station in a remote setting]
Chantal Ouimet: With my dad I used to go out in the forest and he would teach me the trees and the plants and the mushrooms and things like that and so I guess I just enjoyed doing that and later on I liked learning a little bit about plants and things like that so finally when it came time to go to university, I decided that biology would be a neat thing to do.

Chantal: So I got into biology and once I was in biology then I couldn’t decide if I liked plants or animals better so, I had friends who had already chosen birds or plants and they were already fanatics about these things but I couldn’t decide.

Chantal: And then as I went on with my studies I figured out what I really like is the interactions between different animals or different plants or animals and plants or interactions between the environment and the organisms. So that’s how I became an ecologist, to study interactions in the food webs and the influence of the animals and plants on the environment and the influence of the environment on the animals and plants. So then I don’t have to choose if I want to do more animals or more plants.

Chantal: But over time I also figured out I liked a lot the mysteries of what lives in the water, the water looks like it’s all the same everywhere, it’s very flat and it’s transparent and it seems like everything’s the same but once you look under the water and see all the creatures I got very interested in that and so then I became an aquatic ecologist. So, I worked in aquatic ecology for a bit and then I was hired by Parks Canada and now I’m a Northern ecologist, and they do a lot of different things and very little aquatic ecology now.

Chantal: I learn about permafrost, sea ice, tundra plants, remote sensing, but I’ve done just a tiny bit of aquatic ecology since I’ve been with Parks Canada. So that’s the job of being a monitoring ecologist, you have to know a lot of things about different things.

[text on screen To learn more about careers with Parks Canada visit www.pc.gc.ca]

[title: Created for Parks Canada by HyperfocalFilms www.hyperfocalfilms.com]
[title: Parks Canada/Parcs Canada government logo]
[title: Copyright - Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada, represented by Parks Canada, 2010]
[title: Government of Canada logo]
[end]