Wildlife passages and American martenFrom February to October 2014, I worked as a Research Associate at Concordia University. I studied the effect of the highway Route 175 that transects the Laurentides Wildlife Reserve in the Province of Quebec, Canada on the movement of America martens (Martes americana). The highway was just recently widened from 2 lanes to a 4-lane divided highway. Mitigation measures were installed. Mostly fences that funnel small to medium size wildlife through culverts. I spent the winter and spring of 2014 preparing for the summer trapping season and tracking martens caught the previous year. VHF collars are attached to martens and telemetry is used to track their movements around the highway. During the summer, for 2 months my team and I caught martens and replaced or attached new VHF collars to several new individuals. This is an ongoing project that was funded by the Ministry of Transport of Quebec and started in 2012.
|
Connectivity of white-footed miceI completed my M.Sc. project in Biology at McGill with V. Millien and A. Gonzalez in 2013. We published a paper in Molecular Ecology on some of my work. My research involved landscape genetics and ecology and a lot of computer programming and GIS. More precisely, I found a better spatial model which further explained the observed genetic differentiation and connectivity of white-footed mouse populations in Montérégie, Quebec. The main reason why we picked the white-footed mouse as a focal species is because of it's association to tick borne diseases. The much warmer and shorter winters in southern Quebec are causing a northward expansion of the range of this species. With the mice come their ticks, which have infectious diseases such as: human granulocytic ehrlichiosis, Lyme disease and human babesiosis. Further understanding of the dispersal ability of this mouse could help us predict future colonization routes and diseases hot spots.
|
|