Visual surveys provide baseline data on small vessel traffic and waterbirds in a coastal protected area.

The coastal waters of southern British Columbia, Canada, encompass habitat of international conservation significance to coastal and marine birds, including sizeable areas designated in the early 1900s as Migratory Bird Sanctuaries (MBS) to protect overwintering waterfowl from hunting near urban centres. Two of these, Shoal Harbour (SHMBS) and Victoria Harbour (VHMBS), have seen significant marine infrastructure development in recent decades and experience considerable vessel traffic. Vessel-related stressors are known to affect waterbirds, but traffic characteristics in coastal urban areas are poorly understood for the smaller vessels not tracked by Automatic Identification Systems (AIS).

Modelling entanglement rates to estimate mortality of marine birds in British Columbia commercial salmon gillnet fisheries.

Incidental mortality of marine birds in fisheries is an international conservation concern, including in Canada where globally significant populations of vulnerable diving species overlap with coastal gillnet fisheries. In British Columbia (BC), commercial salmon gillnet fishing effort was historically very high (>200,000 days fished annually in the early 1950's), and although this fishery has declined, over 6,400 days were fished annually in the 2006-2016 decade. Observations of seabird bycatch within the commercial fishery, however, are limited in both scope (comprising <2% of cumulative effort 2001-2016) and in time (being available only from 1995 onwards and only for a small number of areas).

A comprehensive optimum integrated water resources management approach for multidisciplinary water resources management problems.

A holistic Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) model can be difficult to implement and the associated high-dimension optimization problems' complexity often forces the decision makers to downscale such problems. These challenges however have motivated this research to develop a comprehensive Optimum IWRM approach (OP-IWRM) using a many-objective optimization algorithm to solve complex and large-scale problems. The approach employs the social, economic, and environmental objectives; ground and surface water resources; and water infrastructure for river basin management to: (1) improve the relevant revenues, (2) enhance community welfare, and (3) pave the road for the decision makers to set better investment policy.

Optimum socio-environmental flows approach for reservoir operation strategy using many-objectives evolutionary optimization algorithm.

Water resource system complexity, high-dimension modelling difficulty and computational efficiency challenges often limit decision makers' strategies to combine environmental flow objectives (e.g. water quality, ecosystem) with social flow objectives (e.

Seasonal variability in vulnerability for Cassin's auklets (Ptychoramphus aleuticus) exposed to microplastic pollution in the Canadian Pacific region.

Marine plastic pollution is an emerging global conservation challenge, potentially impacting organisms at all trophic levels. However, currently it is unclear to what extent plastic pollution is impacting marine organisms at the population, species or multispecies level. In this study, we explore seasonal exposure (i.

Estimation of Coast-Wide Population Trends of Marbled Murrelets in Canada Using a Bayesian Hierarchical Model.

Species at risk with secretive breeding behaviours, low densities, and wide geographic range pose a significant challenge to conservation actions because population trends are difficult to detect. Such is the case with the Marbled Murrelet (Brachyramphus marmoratus), a seabird listed as 'Threatened' by the Species at Risk Act in Canada largely due to the loss of its old growth forest nesting habitat. We report the first estimates of population trend of Marbled Murrelets in Canada derived from a monitoring program that uses marine radar to detect birds as they enter forest watersheds during 923 dawn surveys at 58 radar monitoring stations within the six Marbled Murrelet Conservation Regions on coastal British Columbia, Canada, 1996-2013.

Citizen Science Reveals an Extensive Shift in the Winter Distribution of Migratory Western Grebes.

Marine waterbirds have shown variable trends in abundance over the past four decades with some species displaying steep declines along the Pacific coast from British Columbia through California. One of the most dramatic changes has been that of western grebes (Aechmophorus occidentalis) in the Salish Sea. This region was a former core of the species wintering distribution but they have become increasingly rare prompting calls for conservation action.

Evolutionary and experimental change in egg volume, heterochrony of larval body and juvenile rudiment, and evolutionary reversibility in pluteus form.

Heterochronic developmental plasticity of the juvenile rudiment and larval body of sea urchin larvae occurs in response to supply of food. Evolutionary increase in egg size can also be associated with earlier development of the juvenile rudiment. We examined effects of egg volume of feeding larvae on this heterochrony and other changes in larval form.

Tufted puffin reproduction reveals ocean climate variability.

Anomalously warm sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) are associated with interannual and decadal variability as well as with long-term climate changes indicative of global warming. Such oscillations could precipitate changes in a variety of oceanic processes to affect marine species worldwide. As global temperatures continue to rise, it will be critically important to be able to predict the effects of such changes on species' abundance, distribution, and ecological relationships so as to identify vulnerable populations.