Fisheries and marine ecology
I have extensive experience in stock assessment and providing science advice to managers for decision making, including risk analysis. My most extensive work on fisheries was while working for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Canada. I worked on groundfish stocks of the Northwest Atlantic, including Atlantic halibut, cod and haddock. I am a Center for Independent Experts (CIE) reviewer and have reviewed stock assessments for the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) in the United States. I am currently a member of the Pinniped Research Program and am studying the diet of harbour seals and sea lions.
Woodpeckers and avian diversity
Woodpeckers are ecosystems engineers, that is, they change the environment in ways that allows other organisms to live. They create cavities in trees and build nests for their young. Woodpeckers typically move on to build a new nest in the following year. These cavities provide essential habitat for other species known as secondary cavity-nesters (e.g. bluebirds and tree swallows), which need a cavity to nest but cannot build their own. This dependency is particularly strong in the coniferous forests of North America, such that places with more woodpeckers have a higher diversity of secondary cavity nesters. These relationships are fundamental to our understanding of forest health and the maintenance of biodiversity, and potentially impact our decision of how we manage forests across the landscape.
Aquatic micro-worlds
I have long had a fascination with the small aquatic communities that develop in water held by plants, in particular pitcher plants and bromeliads. These micro-worlds have a surprising amount of biodiversity including bacteria, protists, algae, insects and sometimes even vertebrates, like frogs. These systems have attracted ecologists because they are easy to sample and study the fundamentals of biodiversity and ecosystem function. These questions often appear academic, but they provide a strong intellectual framework from which to examine the relationships between biodiversity and ecosystem function in other systems, like forest and fisheries.
Public outreach through poetry and science
Science and poetry are different ways of exploring our world and our relationships: personal, physical, internal, external. Both poetry and science use language. Both are motivated by intellectual and emotional curiosity. Both aim to discover something new, a fresh perspective. Part and parcel in the process of discovery are the foundations and potential limitations of history, culture, family, finances, and political pressure (to name a few). Science tries to break free by focusing on data. Poetry’s freedom comes from a re-framing, an exposing, a bringing forward. Both query the world with language. I have always believed that poetry and science are not distinct, rather, they blend with their own legitimate strengths. Poetry may, at times, draw more from emotional intelligence, and science, at times, may draw more from structured thinking, but why put them into these boxes? Let them mingle, and our hearts and minds will move together. And maybe then, we will treat our world a little more kindly.
