Professor Sarah Wanless | |
---|---|
Born | Scarborough, England |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of Aberdeen |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Marine ecology |
Institutions | Centre for Ecology &Hydrology |
Sarah Wanless MBE FRSE is a British animal ecologist. She is an expert on seabirds;she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and is Honorary Professor at the Universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen. [1]
Wanless was born in Scarborough,England and moved to Aberdeen,Scotland in 1969 for her undergraduate degree and then her PhD[ where? ],which focused on northern gannets over three seasons on the island of Ailsa Craig in the Firth of Clyde. [1]
She worked at the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology,the Nature Conservancy Council and the British Antarctic Survey before joining the Centre for Ecology &Hydrology (CEH) permanently in 1996 as a Higher Scientific Officer. [2] She rose to Individual Merit Scientist [2] and retired in 2016 but is still involved with research [3] as Emeritus Fellow at CEH. [4]
In the 1980s,Wanless began one of the first radio-tracking studies into seabirds in the Northern Hemisphere,which helped to identify the foraging areas and the dangers that seabirds face due to climate change, [5] pollution,fishing and off-shore wind farms; [6] much of this research was conducted on the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth in Scotland. She was the first female visiting scientist to the British Antarctic Survey's research station on Bird Island in South Georgia, [1] where she studied the diving behaviour of South Georgia shags for two southern summers. [3] Wanless also studied gannets on Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire [7] and researched the foraging of puffins outside of the breeding season. [8]
Over her career,Wanless published 250 papers, [9] her bird tracking data was contributed to the Global Seabird Tracking Database. [10]
Wanless was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to seabird ecology. [11]
Wanless wrote The Puffin with Mike P. Harris,published in 2012 by Bloomsbury ISBN 978-1-4081-0867-3 [18] a revised version of the original 1984 Poyser monograph. [19]
The northern gannet is a seabird, the largest species of the gannet family, Sulidae. It is native to the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean, breeding in Western Europe and Northeastern North America. It is the largest seabird in the northern Atlantic. The sexes are similar in appearance. The adult northern gannet has a mainly white streamlined body with a long neck, and long and slender wings. It is 87–100 cm long with a 170–180 cm (67–71 in) wingspan. The head and nape have a buff tinge that is more prominent in breeding season, and the wings are edged with dark brown-black feathers. The long, pointed bill is blue-grey, contrasting with black, bare skin around the mouth and eyes. Juveniles are mostly grey-brown, becoming increasingly white in the five years it takes them to reach maturity.
The common murre or common guillemot is a large auk. It has a circumpolar distribution, occurring in low-Arctic and boreal waters in the North Atlantic and North Pacific. It spends most of its time at sea, only coming to land to breed on rocky cliff shores or islands.
Harry Forbes Witherby, MBE, FZS, MBOU was a noted British ornithologist, author, publisher and founding editor of the magazine British Birds.
The British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) is an organisation founded in 1932 for the study of birds in the British Isles. The Prince of Wales has been patron since October 2020.
Skokholm or Skokholm Island is an island 2.5 miles (4.0 km) off the coast of Pembrokeshire, Wales, south of the neighbouring island of Skomer. The surrounding waters are a marine reserve and all are part of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park. Both islands are listed as Sites of Special Scientific Interest.
Percy Roycroft Lowe was an English surgeon and ornithologist.
Derek Almey Ratcliffe was one of the most significant British nature conservationists of the 20th century. He was Chief Scientist for the Nature Conservancy Council at the Monks Wood Experimental Station, Abbots Ripton, Huntingdon, retiring in 1989. Ratcliffe was the author of the 1977 Nature Conservation Review, a document which set out the most important sites for nature conservation in the United Kingdom. He also published various works on nature and conservation.
Jeremy John Denis Greenwood CBE is a British ornithologist and was Director of the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) from 1988 until he retired in September 2007.
Ronald Mathias Lockley was a Welsh ornithologist and naturalist. He wrote over fifty books on natural history, including a study of shearwaters, and the book The Private Life of the Rabbit, which was used in the development of his friend Richard Adams's children's book Watership Down.
T. & A. D. Poyser began as a British publisher, founded by Trevor and Anna Poyser in 1973, to specialise in ornithology books. It was located in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, and later in Calton, Staffordshire.
Philip Arthur Dominic Hollom was a British ornithologist.
Bruce Campbell was an English ornithologist, writer and broadcaster, closely associated with the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO).
Emma Louisa Turner or E L Turner was an English ornithologist and pioneering bird photographer. Turner took up photography at age 34, after meeting the wildlife photographer Richard Kearton. She joined the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) in 1901, and by 1904 she had started to give talks illustrated with her own photographic slides; by 1908, when aged 41, she was established as a professional lecturer.
The five Marsh Awards for Ornithology are among over 40 Marsh Awards issued in the United Kingdom by the Marsh Charitable Trust and the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), in the field of ornithology.
The Witherby Memorial Lecture is an academic lectureship awarded by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) annually since 1968. The memorial lecture is in memorandum of Harry Forbes Witherby, a former owner of Witherby, who previously published ornithological books.
Joseph Bryan Nelson MBE FRSE was a British ornithologist, environmental activist and academic. He was a prominent authority on seabirds, publishing numerous books and articles on gannets, cormorants and other species, teaching zoology at the University of Aberdeen, and conducting pioneering ornithological research in Jordan, Christmas Island and the Galápagos Islands. In his lifetime, Nelson was "acclaimed as the world's leading expert on the northern gannet". He also contributed to the creation of Christmas Island National Park, which helped to preserve the habitat of the endangered Abbott's booby.
Stephanie Joy Tyler, also known as Steph Tyler, is a British ornithologist, zoologist, naturalist, conservationist, and author from Monmouthshire. She is particularly known for her work on Dippers and the preservation of river habitats.
Patricia Monaghan is a British ornithologist who is Regius Professor of Zoology in the School of biodiversity, one health & veterinary medicine at the University of Glasgow.
Alexander L. Bond is a Canadian conservation biologist, ecologist, and curator. He holds the position of Principal Curator and Curator in Charge of Birds at the Natural History Museum at Tring. Bond is actively involved with the marine plastics pollution research group Adrift Lab. Additionally, he serves as the Ornithologist in Residence at St Nicholas Church, Leicester, a church known for its LGBTQ+-inclusive stance.
Jane Reid is an evolutionary ecologist from the UK, she is International Chair Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway and is also Professor of Population & Evolutionary Ecology at the University of Aberdeen.