André Desrochers

Regular Member
Animal Ecology/Conservation
Université Laval
Faculté de foresterie et géomatique
Département des sciences du bois et de la forêt
Pavillon Abitibi-Price
2405 rue de la Terrasse
Québec (Québec) G1V 0A6
Canada

(418) 656-2131 poste 2908

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News

• We are planning for a 23rd season of bird surveys to measure spatiotemporal trends in bird occupancy and nesting success at the Forêt Montmorency. In 2017 we published a study  in le Naturaliste Canadien, summarizing population trends at the forêt Montmorency and comparing them with other Quebec surveys. Contrary to the doom and gloom we constantly hear about, the songbird situation at our forest is very good.

• Snow tracking The winter of 2018 will not go on record as a strong field season. We went to Forêt Montmorency only a fw times, but still, we managed to survey more than 100 km of transects, counting 2952 tracks. The resulting database now has 59696 tracks. A Facebook group  remains active, but of course will be on the back-burner for a few months till next winter. Please join us, if you are into wildlife tracking. Thanks to technician Martine Lapointe and volunteers for their help this year again.

• Restored peatland songbirds This summer I will go back to the field to conduct bird surveys in restored peatlands of Quebec and New Brunswick. The idea is to see whether songbird communities of restored vs natural peatlands converge. This work is cone in collaboration with the Groupe de recherche en écologie des tourbières . Instead of sending birders to the field, I will deploy recorders this time, and analyse acoustic data with software tools, particularly the new bioacoustic R package developed by CEF students Jean Marchal and François Fabianek.

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!)

Home | My Academic Background | Research Themes | Findings
Former grads | Publications

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