UNB ACWERN Newsletter

Vol. 3 (Spring 2001)

News from the Diamond Lab at the University of New Brunswick….

There are a few news items from the Diamond lab at UNB since our last newsletter. There are four main sections to this Newsletter: 1) Alumni Updates, 2) Current Students 3) Honors Students and 4) New Grants

Krista Amey is currently working in the data management sector with the CWS-Delta. She will be going out to Triangle Island in April through the end of June. When she returns to Vancouver she will begin a contract writing a technical report at CWS on ship at-sea seabird surveys (a 20-year data set). She can be reached at: Amey-Barter@telus.net

Laurel Bernard has started a job with the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) - Atlantic Regional office (in Fredericton) as a projects assistant. The NCC is a non-profit agency that secures ecologically important lands all across Canada. She is responsible for tracking all of the properties that NCC secures in the Atlantic region (either through donations, conservation easements or purchase), dealing with legal paperwork, writing up reports on the properties, and some biological evaluation of the properties (field work!!). She can be reached at: laurel.bernard@natureconservancy.ca

Falk Huettmann is working as a PostDoc at the Centre for Wildlife Ecology, Simon Fraser University. Most of his work deals with GIS, field habitat issues and marine surveys of Marbled Murrelets in Desolation Sound and Clayoquot Sound, British Columbia. One of his tasks is to compile 1:20,000 forest cover and environmental maps for the study areas. He is also looking into multivariate GIS modelling for spatial predictions of Marbled Murrelets (nest sites, marine distribution, lake-use). He is in close contact with Krista Amey at CWS-Delta and Laura Tranquilla (formerly McFarlane) in the SFU lab.

He recently attended the 2001Pacific Seabird Group meeting in Hawaii, gave a DISTANCE sampling workshop at Acadia University and is advising a student on a small PIROP seabird data project overlaying satellite images (chlorophyll) at Bedford Institure for Oceanography.

Falk has the following papers forthcoming:

Huettmann, F. and A.W. Diamond (in press). Using PCA Scores to classify species
communities: an example using seabird classifications at sea. Journal for Applied
Statistics. (from a PhD Thesis chapter). (Some approaches dealing with seabird communities and PCA from transect data)

Huettmann F. and Diamond A.W. (in press). Seabird colony locations and environmental determination of seabird distribution: A spatially explicit seabird breeding model in the Northwest Atlantic. Ecological Modelling. (PhD Thesis chapter). (An approach using environmental and species GIS data and fill gaps with lacking survey information by GIS modelling and predicting based on multivariate algorithms)

Huettmann, F. (in press). Summary from the Sea of Okhotsk Shorebird Study 2000: Migration on Sakhalin Island (May), and Kamchatka and Magadan (August). The
Stilt. (on overview and summary of research work in Russian Far East, focus on shorebirds and coastal conservation)

See Falk's recently updated web-page for more information:

http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Quad/5377/index.html

Current Students:

Sarah Jamieson received a Science Horizons Award and got her first paper published:

Jamieson, S.E., Robertson, G.J., and Gilchrist, H.G. 2001. Long-tailed Duck
diet before and after ice formation in the Belcher Islands, Nunavut.
Waterbirds 24(1): 129-132.

Kate Devlin attended the UNB's ninth annual Graduate Student Association conference on Student Research in February. She won second place for her presentation: Who's who among terns.

André Breton, Dedreic Grecian, Tara Warren and Kate Devlin attended the Northeast Wildlife Graduate Student Conference hosted by the University of New Hampshire in early March. Papers presented included:

André Breton, Tony Diamond, Stephen Kress and Richard Elliot: Colony and cohort effects on survival and inter-annual movement of Atlantic Puffins (Fratercula arctica) in the Gulf of Maine
Dedreic Grecian and Tony Diamond: Finding concealed Razorbill nests
Tara Warren and Tony Diamond: Woodpecker productivity and foraging habitat
Kate Devlin and Tony Diamond: Who's who among terns

It's been 4 years since UNB hosted this graduate student conference and we are looking forward to hosting it again next spring. Look for future postings!

Tony Diamond, Karel Allard, Brenda Blinn, Nikki Benjamin, André Breton, Dedreic Grecian, and Kate Devlin attended the first joint meeting of the Gulf of Maine Seabird Working Group and the Atlantic Canada Tern Working Group. The meeting was held on Campobello Island, NB and was organized by ACWERN alum Kim Mawhinney. The second day of the meeting was devoted to presentations. Everyone attending from UNB presented a paper.

Tony Diamond: Overview of seabird studies by ACWERN at UNB
Karel Allard, Tony Diamond and H. Grant Gilchrist: Investigation of prebasic moult in Herring Gulls (Larus argentatus) and Great Black-backed Gulls (Larus marinus)
Brenda Blinn and Tony Diamond: Selection an use of brood-rearing habitat by Common Eider on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick
Nikki Benjamin and Tony Diamond: Comparative feeding ecology of Herring and Great Black-backed Gulls in the Bay of Fundy
André Breton, Tony Diamond, Stephen Kress and Richard Elliot: Colony and year effects on survival and intercolony movement of Atlantic Puffins (Fratercula arctica) in the Gulf of Maine
Dedreic Grecian and Tony Diamond: Finding concealed Razorbill nests
Kate Devlin and Tony Diamond: Sexing Arctic Terns in the field and in the lab

Honours Students:

Chantal Gagnon successfully defended her honors thesis in the Dept. of Biology: Effects of Human Disturbance on the Breeding Biology of Arctic Terns (Sterna paradisaea) on Machias Seal Island, NB.

Michael Edwards and Vicky Violette will defend their honors projects for the Dept. of Forestry in the near future.

New Grants:

A new grant has been confirmed through AQUANET (the NCE for Aquaculture), to look at seaduck predation on mussel farms in Prince Edward Island in collaboration with ACWERN Alumnus Dr. Greg Robertson of CWS. Tony Diamond and Diana Hamilton will co-supervise one M.Sc. student (currently being recruited) on this project, which will be complementary to another M.Sc project supervised by Dr. Myriam Barbeau (UNB Biology) on mussel population dynamics. Both will start in September.