Honours and Graduate Student Opportunities 2012-2015

There are opportunities over the next 3 years for diligent, hard-working honours and graduate students interested in northern ecology to work in northern Canada. Most of my work is at Kluane Lake Field Station of the Arctic Institute in the southwestern Yukon. I prefer to accept students who have obtained fellowship support in order to use our research funds most effectively for field work. Six projects in particular are available to interested students:

1. To investigate the possibility of estimating moose populations by means of motion-sensitive small video cameras set at mineral licks in the SW Yukon. This will involve summer field work in the southern Yukon on moose populations, the visiting of mineral licks, and computer analysis of the resulting photos that the Yukon Fish and Wildlife Department has been collecting. The major challenge is to develop methods of identifying individual animals from coat colour. This could be a M.Sc. or a Ph.D. project, and will be done in collaboration with Environment Yukon, Fish and Wildlife.

2. To measure survival rates of juvenile snowshoe hares in areas of contrasting red squirrel abundance to determine if red squirrel predation on juvenile hares reduces population growth rates. This field work builds on studies done earlier on juvenile snowshoe hares at Kluane. This field work could lead to a M.Sc. or Ph.D. degree.

3. To measure survival and population change in arctic ground squirrels at high and low density sites to determine the causes of density differences between boreal forest and alpine populations of ground squirrels. This field project at Kluane Lake follows on from Scott Donker's recent M.Sc. and could be a M.Sc. or Ph.D. project.

4. To investigate the correlation of white spruce tree growth and cone production in the Kluane region from the individual records of marked trees. Individual trees have been marked, measured and their cone production counted annually since 1996. The variability in cone production among individual trees is large. Years of high cone production are region-wide but some individual trees do not respond. This variation can be analyzed through the lens of rapid climate change in this part of the Yukon. This project could be a M.Sc. project.

5. To determine the correlation in ground berry production between sites in the boreal forest and alpine and subalpine sites in the southwestern Yukon. At least 6 species of ground berries can be measured, and in the boreal forest vary greatly in production from year to year. We do not know if high crops in the forest coincide with high crops in alpine areas, and we do not know if spatially separated alpine areas are in phase. This project could be an honours project or a M.Sc. project.

6. To investigate diets of small mammals at Kluane Lake from cafeteria tests and fecal analysis. We do not know for this region which berries and plants the three major rodent species utilize and prefer. This could be an M.Sc. field and laboratory project.

Please email me if you are interested in doing honours or graduate research on any of these projects. I emphasize that because funding is limited for Kluane research our first priority will be potential students who have obtained fellowship support.