PhD Student (2024-present)

I am a PhD student and study population dynamics in a population of Savannah sparrows (Passerculus sandwichensis) located on Kent Island, in New Brunswick. My research focuses on survival, and the degree to which this key demographic parameter varies across the full annual cycle of migratory birds: the breeding, nonbreeding, and migration seasons. I plan use a mixture of mark-resighting and tracking via radio-tags to determine how, where, and why survival varies across the annual cycle of Savannah sparrows. This fills in a recurring gap in our knowledge of populations dynamics of small, hard-to-track migratory birds, for whom variation in survival rates across seasons are typically unknown.

I completed my HBSc in Environmental Biology at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and I studied migratory connectivity in the blackpoll warbler (Setophaga striata) as part of my MSc degree, completed here, in the Norris lab.

Publication

Duali, J., DeLuca, W. V., Mackenzie, S. A., Tremblay, J. A., Drolet, B., Haché, S., Roberto-Charron, A., Holguín-Ruiz, M., Boardman, R., Cooke, H. A., Rimmer, C. C., McFarland, K. P., Marra, P. P., Taylor, P. D., & Norris, D. R. (2024). Range-wide post- and pre-breeding migratory networks of a declining neotropical–nearctic migratory bird, the blackpoll warbler. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 30229. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-80838-9