Profil de membre
Vincent Careau effectue un doctorat dans le laboratoire de Don Thomas. Il s'intéresse à l'éthologie et aux aspects énergétiques du tempérament.
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WELCOME!

News

• May 2010: Migratory songbirds are back! This summer, 4 field ornithologists will measure reproductive success of songbirds at the Forêt Montmorency. The team members are: Aude CORBANI (PhD - 1st year), Marie-Hélène HACHEY (MSc - 1st year), Josiane BÉGIN (stage, cégep FX-Garneau), and Fanny SENEZ GAGNON (stage, cégep St-Laurent). With this great team, we hope to get one of the best-surveyed Quebec Breeding Bird Atlas squares! We also hope to develop a brand new quantitative method to obtain estimates of reproductive rates for an entire community of species over large spatial extents.
• February 2010: My recent work on rapid evolution of bird wing shape has been a success. The journal Ecology will publish it as a Report in its next issue. You can see the preprint in the journal's website. CBC has interviewed me on 24Feb for the "As it Happens" show. See also: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/March10/ForestBirds.html

Field work (2009-10)

• Spruce Grouse (Falcipennis canadensis) in Boreal "islands" of Southern Quebec. Céline Macabiau started her PhD field work in spring 2008, in collaboration with Québec's Ministère des Ressources naturelles et de la Faune. After two extended field seasons, things are going very well and there are stacks of data to analyze... Céline has just completed 20-km translocations of adults to test habitat degradation vs. habitat isolation hypotheses. From the look of it, birds translocates to isolated woodland patches do not seem to enjoy them, because they move much more extensively than birds translocated into less isolated patches. For details, please visit Céline's web page on CEF's site!
• Winter 2009-10: 11th year of snow-tracking of mammals at the Forêt Montmorency. This winter, we surveyed tracks on 151 km of transects on roads/trails, and 30 km of transects off beaten paths. Since 2000, we covered > 1480 km of transects, totalling more than 26,000 GPS track locations. We monitor: marten, weasels, fisher, lynx, wolf, fox, snowshoe hare, moose, squirrel, flying squirrel, and even grouse. Nobody reobserved that mythical Forêt Montmorency Couguar of Fall 2007, but 2009 was again season full of surprises and neat observations (e.g. marten). Despite a rather mild and dry 2010 winter, snow tracking went very well. This winter again, Canada Lynx was absent. However, Fisher came back with a vengeance, presumably attracted by Porcupines. Also, Moose was all over the study area, not confined to small ranges as it usually would be, because snow cover was so thin and thus so easy to walk on. Next year you should come and take a look for yourself!
• Été 2010: 2 new grad projects at Forêt Montmorency. Welcome to Aude CORBANI (PhD) and Marie-Hélène HACHEY (MSc) who will both work on parental activity of nesting boreal birds. With Aude and Marie-Hélène, we hope to develop a rapid and accurate method to estimate reproductive output based solely on parental activity. This would be a great tool given the difficulty of finding nests, let alone looking at their contents, in this type of forest.
  

If you are interested in volunteering for our snow tracking project in winter 2010-11, please write me (). For the snow-tracking project, from mid-January, we have training sessions over the weekends when weather allows it (i.e., no snow nor strong winds in the preceding night).

MY ACADEMIC BACKGROUND

• Fellow of the American Ornithologists' Union
  *Associate Editor : Avian Conservation and Ecology (ACE-ECO)
• 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 the influence of landscape on 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 simple experiments. Those approaches will remain the basis of my work (and that of my students) in the near future. Additionally, I have recently 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. Most of my research relies on intensive use of linear modeling and Geographical Information Systems (GIS).

Let me present my lab's research under three umbrellas: habitat fragmentation, winter landscape ecology, and peatland bird ecology.

Habitat fragmentation

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.

But are those challenges sufficient to explain the absence of some breeding birds from isolated forest patches? Our preliminary research suggests that no. Recently, our lab has shown some exciting patterns of clustering in forest bird territories, something that is often suspected but rarely, if ever, quantified in small forest birds. Our recent work points to a relationship between the tendency of species to occur in clusters (“mini-colonies”) and their preference for large, unfragmented, forests. Perhaps some birds avoid small forest fragments because they require the presence of conspecific neighbours, to obtain extra-pair fertilizations (e.g. the work by Stutchbury at York, Ontario) or use “public information” provided by neighbours on habitat quality (e.g. the work by Danchin, CRNS, France).

More recently, our lab has been working on long term databases (Ontario Forest Bird Monitoring Program, Christmas Bird Count) to evaluate the stability of bird-landscape relationships through time. I have also initiated collaborations with researchers in the Tropics ( Panama , Gabon ), again on the issues of habitat fragmentation and animal movement.

There sure is scope for exciting new advances in those areas of research, and we are working on it !

Winter landscape ecology

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!)

Peatland bird ecology

This research has been going on since 1993 and continues to yield interesting results and opportunities for graduate work. Peatlands in southern Canada have been under attack from a variety of users, mostly agriculture and forestry, but also urbanization and the peat moss industry. Since 1993, we work in collaboration with the Peatland Ecology Research Group  to measure the recolonization of abandoned and restored peatland sites by birds and other animals. Our general approach is to build a long-term database on breeding bird occurrence in sites recovering from various peat extraction methods, as well as bird occurrence on nearby undisturbed sites. We now do bird counts in 15-20 peatlands every six years (was initially 3 years), and the next survey will be in 2011.

So far, we find that although birds do colonize abandoned sites readily, the species communities of post-harvest sites differ greatly from those of nearby undisturbed sites, even after decades of slow vegetation recovery. Our peatland bird research has demonstrated the unique contribution of this ecosystem to southern Québec landscapes' biodiversity. In the next few years, I plan to initiate a detailed analysis of the regional variation and metapopulation dynamics of Palm Warbler, a flagship species closely associated to peatlands.

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