Jalene LaMontagne began serving as the E. Desmond Lee Endowed Professor in Botanical Studies in August. (Photo by Derik Holtmann)

The past three months have been anything but calm for Jalene LaMontagne. She’s moved out of her house in Chicago and packed up her lab at DePaul University, closed on a home near Tower Grove Park and started her new role as the E. Desmond Lee Endowed Professor in Botanical Studies at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.

She’s grateful to finally be catching her breath and settling into her new surroundings.

“The reception has been really great,” LaMontagne said. “People in the biology department seem very happy to have this position filled.”

LaMontagne is the first person to hold the title of Des Lee Professor in Botanical Studies since Elizabeth “Toby” Kellogg in 2013. The position comes with a dual appointment as a principal investigator at the Missouri Botanical Garden, which contributed to the allure of the job.

“When I saw the ad, I was like, ‘I need to apply for that job,’” LaMontagne said. “What a great opportunity to connect with a community partner – in this case, the Missouri Botanical Garden – which is known around the world as a place to study plants. That just seemed really excellent.”

Strong collaborations

LaMontagne describes herself as a population ecologist with an interest in studying variation that exist across time and space. She’s spent more than two decades conducting research on white spruce trees and other boreal conifers in the forests of North America and has received more than $1.1 million in federal funding from the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy.

Jalene LaMontagne looks through binoculars to count cones on a conifer tree. (Photo courtesy of Jalene LaMontagne)

One particular focus of her work has been trying to understand the phenomenon of mast seeding – the highly variable but synchronous production of seeds from one year to the next among a species of plants. She has been leading a team of 19 scientists from around the United States and internationally, working on a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research Network Office to study mast seeding as it occurs among different species within the same forest communities.

“I’ve been really fortunate to have opportunities to work with collaborators, both within the institutions I’ve been at, and across institutions and different parts of the world,” LaMontagne said. “It’s really cool.”

They have an upcoming publication of some of their research findings in a paper titled “Community synchrony in seed production is associated with trait similarity and climate across North America” in the journal Ecology Letters.

“Jalene has led a number of large collaborations to address questions that are bigger and broader than any individual research group would be able to consider,” said Professor Bethany Zolman, who serves as the chair of UMSL’s Department of Biology. “In addition, she organized these teams in a thoughtful way, bringing together collections of scientists from different fields and backgrounds that have the combined power required to think about bigger-picture questions. Her past success in collecting data, publishing her results, and securing funding made Jalene a great candidate.”

Finding her path

LaMontagne, who has authored or co-authored more than 60 peer-reviewed articles going back to her time as a doctoral student at the University of Alberta, would have had a difficult time believing where her career has taken her when she was growing up.

New cones hang from a white spruce tree. (Photo courtesy of Jalene LaMontagne)

Her father served in the Canadian military, so she moved often as a child, even spending a stint in Germany, before settling in Ontario for high school. She was unsure what she wanted to study as she stared down the prospect of becoming the first member of her family to pursue higher education.

“I took an aptitude test, and it came back with every single kind of engineer there is,” LaMontagne said. “I’m not an engineer.”

She considered attending a military university, figuring it’d be a good way to get her education paid for, and even made it through basic training before eventually deciding instead to enroll at the University of Calgary. She started out majoring in mechanical engineering but used her freshman year to test out a lot of different academic disciplines – astronomy, calculus, economics and history.

Someone mentioned biology and biotechnology, and that piqued her curiosity, but it wasn’t until her sophomore year, when she took her first college biology course and got to the part about ecology and evolution, that she found her calling.

“I’m like, ‘Oh, this is what I want to do,’” LaMontagne said.

She would go on to earn a bachelor’s degree in ecology and pursue a master’s in conservation ecology at the University of Calgary.

Called to the forest

For her master’s thesis, LaMontagne studied the habitat selection of trumpeter swans as they migrated, trying to determine why they chose to settle in particular ponds along their route one year and not the next.

“They all sort of look the same,” LaMontagne said of the ponds. “Of course, when you go and then take measurements on them, it’s like, ‘Oh, actually the plants that are the food in these ponds are different, and the plants rely on certain water chemistry and all that type of stuff that also varies across these ponds.’”

(From left) Master’s student Riley Adams, lab technician Kiley Chernicky and doctoral student Addy Yoder stand in a forest in the Huron Mountains of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. All three are joining Jalene LaMontagne’s lab at UMSL after working with her at DePaul University. (Photo courtesy of Jalene LaMontagne)

She sees connection in that work and her study of mast seeding today to the aptitude test that suggested she should go into mechanical engineering.

“Mechanical engineers take all these pieces and put them together to try to make something bigger work,” she said. “With the research that I do, I try to understand all of those pieces to see why this broader pattern emerges. Ecology is pretty quantitative. Ecologists are known for being pretty strong statistically and trying to explain all this variation.”

LaMontagne didn’t realize she’d end up studying trees until after she started pursuing her PhD. Her doctoral research took her to the Yukon Territory in northwestern Canada, where she conducted field work in a valley tucked between mountains where the only conifer tree was the white spruce. She began by studying the red squirrels that depended on its cones as one of the only sources of food they could store to survive the harsh winters.

As she read more literature about the environment, her interest shifted more to the trees and trying to understand why some years they’d produce more cones than others.

“Trees are amazing,” she said. “If you want to track individuals over time with animals, you have to tag them, and then you have to go find them again. And animals do all these things, and you may or may not find them again. But with trees, they should stay in the exact same place from one year to the next year, which makes them really great to study.”

New possibilities

LaMontagne spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow back at the University of Calgary after earning her PhD in 2007. That led her to her first faculty appointment as an assistant professor at the newly launched Asian University for Women in Bangladesh. In 2011, she moved back to North America to become an assistant professor at DePaul.

Jalene LaMontagne sits with students Riley Adams, Kiley Chernicky and Addy Yoder looking out over a lake in the Huron Mountains of northern Michigan. (Photo courtesy of Jalene LaMontagne)

At DePaul, she quickly went to work setting up a long-term study on tree reproduction, tagging more than 1,000 individual trees in forests across Minnesota, Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

That remained at the heart of the work as she was promoted up the faculty ranks at DePaul, becoming an associate professor with tenure in 2018 and a full professor in 2022.

She’s bringing that focus with her to UMSL. She already has two graduate students – one in the doctoral program and another in the master’s program – who have followed her from Chicago to be part of her lab, and she’s looking forward to engaging more undergraduate and graduate students in research in the future.

“In times of accelerating biodiversity loss, it is incredibly important to advance the understanding of plant ecology but also to train the next generation of biodiversity scientists,” said Gunter Fischer, the senior vice president for science and conservation research at the Missouri Botanical Garden. “The expertise she brings to St. Louis opens up new opportunities for collaborations between Garden researchers and UMSL.”

LaMontagne is eager to see what work they can do together and what new experiences her connection with the Garden can create for students.

“I expect that there’ll be students in my lab that’ll do projects that’ll be directly related with the Botanical Garden and some of the herbarium specimens and collections that they have,” she said. “That’s certainly an interest of mine. They have a bunch of expertise in areas of seeds and seed collections, which I’m curious to talk to folks about. Also, I have visited the Shaw Nature Reserve, and they have some shortleaf pine, which is the only native pine species in Missouri. We have plans to go out there and maybe establish some local research. We’re still in the early stages of figuring that out.”

Her new colleagues are just as excited about the possibilities.

“We have historically had a strong relationship with the Missouri Botanical Garden,” Zolman said. “But having Jalene in this position strengthens that connection. It allows our students a clear path to connect with Garden scientists, access their collections, and visit their established field sites all over the world. It has potential benefits for current and future students in the classroom, in the research lab, and engaging in sharing our science with the public.”