Beauregard, Frieda
Academic Associate;
Curator, McGill University Herbarium
“Plants present us with endless mysteries to uncover, I feel like I will never be able to know everything I would like to about them. What fascinates me most is their many strategies for survival under a wide array of situations, and their ability to shape their ecosystems, also, working with the amazing breadth of early North American plant collections in the McGill University Herbarium has inspired in me a great curiosity about the people who worked to collect them and the eras of history they support as objects of material culture.”
Dr. Frieda Beauregard manages the McGill University Herbarium. She is passionate about botany and endeavors to share this passion through her research, teaching, and outreach projects. She has a background in plant ecology, biogeography, soil science, and visual art. In her role as Herbarium curator, she pursues interdisciplinary projects, working with scientists, historians, and artists among others to share and promote the richness of the McGill Herbarium collections and to advance the sustainability and biodiversity goals of the University. The McGill Herbarium is a resource for all McGillians who need to identify or voucher plant collections as part of their research; or who would like to use the collections for their research. If this describes you, please contact Dr. Beauregard to arrange access. However, please note that Dr. Beauregard does not independently take on the supervision of graduate students and so will not reply to inquiries on positions available, and may not be in a position to reply to other kinds of inquiries if made from outside the University or not aligned with her position at the McGill University Herbarium.
- Ph.D. Plant Ecology (McGill University)
- M.Sc. Forestry (McGill University)
- B.Sc. Plant Science (McGill University)
- Fonds de recherche du Québec award
- Scheulich scholarship
- Canadian Botanical Association Porsild-Consaul award
Dr. Beauregard's research interests revolve around historical plant collections and the history of plant collecting in Canada, as well as quality assessment of citizen science data gathered through apps such as iNaturalist, the use of visual art in connecting people to plants and nature, and developing a better understanding of why plants grow where we find them in the wild.
I am currently a member of a large research project titled Hidden hands in natural history Collections In Colonial Settings, which aims to examine some early natural history collections stewarded by McGill University for their contributions and connections to groups who were generally not acknowledged for their contributions at the time the collections were made. In this project I am working with a very early plant collection from Winnipeg that was made by Frances Ramsey Simpson during the time she lived in this region from 1830-1833 as well as connecting this collection to modern and historic Métis beadwork artists. I am also working on a project examining the biases present in different kinds of publicly available data on plant occurrence locations, and how to improve the collection of this data by citizen scientists.