Profil de membre
Flavie Ferrer est étudiante à la maîtrise à l'UQAT. Elle s'intéresse à l'analyse du profil de densité radial des arbres par échantillonnage non destructif à des fins dendrochronologiques.

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WELCOME!

News

• My lab completed in 2017 a 22nd season of inventory and measurement of the breeding success of songbirds' '' at Forest Montmorency. A recent publication  in Le Naturaliste Canadien summarizes the the Montmorency Forest and compares them to those elsewhere in Quebec. In short, things are going very well in terms of trends and avian reproduction at the Forest Montmorency, but bad weather, forest edges and squirrels are negative factors whose impact we quantified.
• Summer 2017: Our lab has continued to measure avian nesting success at the Forêt Montmorency. We do these surveys since 1995, using a novel method combining detection of parental behavior and hierarchical statistical modeling. Deeper analyses are long overdue, and I will do my best this year to fix that.

• For a fourth year, our team has set transmitters on three species of thrushes (Bicknell [above], gray-cheeked and olive-backed) in order to reveal their migratory routes and their migration phenology. This is possible thanks to the MOTUS network (www.motus.org), which is revolutionizing our ability to track birds on their journeys for thousands of kilometers. This network is based on thousands of transmitters captured by hundreds of antennas (eg picture below) distributed in eastern North America and increasingly in Latin America. These birds will be caught in the summer at the Montmorency Forest and in the fall at the Tadoussac Bird Observatory. We hope to identify specific migration corridors for these species, and elucidate in general the pitfalls they may encounter en route. Camille Bégin Marchand , a regular of the Tadoussac Bird Observatory, passionate of whales also, began her masters in January 2017 on this subject.

• We are fully prepared for another winter of snow tracking. This year, the core team will consist of myself, and Martine Lapointe (technician). And of course, we hope this winter to spend a few days introducing snow tracking of mammals for those interested to lean this exciting and simple technique. If this is your case, just join our Facebook group  . FWe conduct this project since 2000. Every winter, some 150 km of trails and paths, plus 30 km off-road GPS to identify areas frequented by mammals wintering at Forêt Montmorency: marten, weasel, fisher, lynx, wolf, fox, hare, squirrel, moose, etc. In 17 years, we have gathered data on 2400 km of transects. and up to date we have located on GPS nearly 60000 tracks. We still have not seen the legendary Cougar though...

• My blog on Laval University Contact magazine, as well as Facebook is now a thing of the past (this probably delights my 'haters'). I published my iconoclastical thoughts on subjects that interest me, always related to the environment but more and more I felt like preaching for the "converted", thus amplifying the sad phenomenon of the "echo chamber". I plan to reconnect with the blogosphere, but in a slightly less political way, by publishing analyzes on the ornithological data provided by the thousands of amateurs in Quebec. To be continued.

MY ACADEMIC BACKGROUND

• Fellow of the American Ornithologists' Union
• vice-president of Regroupement QuébecOiseaux
  
• Visiting Scholar 2008-2009 (Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Cornell U., NY, USA)
  Bioacoustics and avian microevolution
• Visiting scholar 2001-2002 (Dept. of Ecology and Systematics, U. of Helsinki, Finland)
  Forest fragmentation and habitat selection in Siberian flying squirrels
• Postdoc 1993-1994 (Plant Sciences, Université Laval)
  Avian communities of exploited vs. natural peatlands
• Postdoc 1992-1993 (Biology, Université Laval)
  Population Ecology of Greater Snow Geese at Bylot Island, Nunavik
• Postdoc 1991 (Zoology, University of Cambridge, UK)
  Mating System of Alpine Accentors in the French Pyrénées
• PhD in Zoology, 1991 (University of Cambridge, UK)
  Age and reproduction in European Blackbirds, Turdus merula
• MSc in Zoology, 1988 (University of Alberta)
  Ecological correlates of social dominance in winter flocks of Black-capped Chickadees
• BSc Biology, 1985 (Université Laval)

RESEARCH THEMES

Animal Ecologists have always been interested in the distribution of animals in natural and man-made landscapes. It has also been of high relevance to conservation biologists. The long-term objective of my research programs is to better understand habitat selection by wildlife (mostly birds but sometimes, mammals). I analyze this problem 1) through detailed study of behaviour, often with individually-marked birds, 2) through the analysis of species occurrence over entire landscapes and 3) through the MOTUS network. Those approaches will remain the basis of my work (and that of my students) in the near future. Additionally, I have developed a keen interest in the short-term evolutionary consequences of environmental changes on birds, in ecomorphological as well as behavioral terms.

I have recently broadened emphasis to include winter. I am interested to address the problem of landscape-scale habitat selection under harsh weather conditions in boreal forests harvested for timber (Forêt Montmorency ). I have also broadened the scope to mammals, mostly through spatially-explicit analyses of high-precision data on the tracks they leave on the snow.

Habitat selection

There is a vast amount of literature on habitat fragmentation, to say the least. A lot of it shows that birds distribute themselves in landscapes according to the amount and pattern of habitat well beyond their home range limits. Yet, we are far from a general understanding of the processes leading to those patterns. Our research frames that problem in terms of two main driving forces, patch isolation and patch quality. Patch isolation: Our research on gap crossing and response to forest edges by birds have had much impact in Landscape Ecology. It suggests that small openings in the forest canopy (roads, small cuts, etc) do indeed pose challenges to dispersing birds. Chickadees, gray jays and three-toed woodpeckers monitored by GPS tend to respond to small open areas by moving along forest edges. Based on our homing experiments (birds caught, marked and released kilometers away), it seems that those “small challenges” posed by gaps add up to major movement limitation over entire landscapes.

More recently, our lab has been working on long term databases (eBird, Christmas Bird Count) to evaluate the stability of bird-landscape relationships through time.

...in Winter

Québec winters pose immense challenges for wintering birds and mammals, and our lab is interested to see if those challenges are exacerbated by deforestation and fragmentation of habitat. For birds, much of the "habitat fragmentation" literature singles out long-distance migrants and the breeding season in mostly agricultural landscapes. Yet, for species spending the whole year in temperate and especially boreal ecosystems, factors limiting their populations are just as likely to occur during the winter.

Apart from the previous and a few other pioneering studies however, our knowledge of landscape effects on nonbreeding birds remains very limited. The problem is of high conservation relevance in boreal forests, where landscapes are rapidly changing due to timber harvest. Given that 12 of 15 forest birds of high conservation concern in boreal forests are nonmigratory, there is an urgency to obtain information on how birds deal with boreal landscape change in winter. Thus, research on wintering birds of boreal forests holds "discovery potential" as much for conservation-oriented as for basic research.

All of our winter research is currently done at Forêt Montmorency, just North of Québec city (75 km). At an altitude of 700-1000 m, with over 6 meters of snowfall each year, the place is perfect for the study of harsh winter (and for cross-country skiing!)

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