Undergrad project gets into BioScience

Dawn Wiseman

In the fall of 2004, when Jim Grant was preparing his course outline for Applied Ecology and Conservation Biology, he was getting a little discouraged. As a final year course designed to get students to apply previous knowledge, he thought Canadian content and context would be much more interesting (and fun) for them to explore.

Unfortunately, “there was very little of it.” So Grant and course TA, PhD student Ivan Dolinsek, decided the undergrads could generate CanCon as part of their class work. Using the COSEWIC database of species at risk, each student would produce a term paper on the causes of species endangerment in Canada.

The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) is constituted through the federal Species at Risk Act (SARA) as the authority for assessing the conservation status of species that may be at risk of extinction. It maintains an online database of status reports. Each report focuses on one species and contains “the best available information” on its status, including “distribution, population sizes and trends, habitat availability and trends, and threats to” survival.

Dolinsek mined the database to create species lists. “Each student ended up having to pull out relevant data for about 30 species.” The returned data to the TA, who collated it and returned it as a spreadsheet. Students then analyzed the results and wrote their papers.

In looking at the resulting work, Grant realized his students might be on to something. “Overall the conclusions they reached were looking like what I had seen in published papers, but always questioned, as the source did not seem clear. As a scientist you always want to know what the source is.”

Grant contacted COSEWIC, only to be told that a comprehensive compilation of threats to species in Canada had not been done. Then he floated the idea of writing a paper on the topic by Oscar Venter, an undergraduate who had been in the class and had an NSERC undergraduate summer research grant. “He just ran with the idea,” Grant said.

With Venter eager to coordinate the project, Grant sent an email to all the students asking if anyone else wanted in. Nathalie Brodeur, Leah Nemiroff and Brenna Belland (along with Dolinsek) volunteered time to bring more rigour to work they had already done.

As a group they re-gathered, re-analyzed and reviewed the data while comparing results with key publications from both the U.S. and Europe. Brodeur, now a PhD student at Université Laval, verified and standardized the data, and made sure, “We were all working from the same perception of the threat definitions defined at the start of the project. In doing so, I standardized the definitions further to include all causes affecting all taxa of the Canadian species we analyzed.”

As the senior author, Venter (who is currently conducting fish population studies off the coast of Alaska) was the driving force of the project. Grant is full of admiration for his former student’s determination and research abilities.

Grant also said Venter’s enthusiasm and naïveté helped get the paper published. “When we considered BioScience, one of the key publications in the field, I wasn’t sure they would publish it, but Oscar was convinced they would.”

The reviewers agreed with Venter. While they did make a few suggestions regarding minor changes, each of them had high praise for the piece. Wrote one, “The manuscript by Venter et al. represents the most comprehensive examination to date of the threats to persistence experienced by species-at-risk in Canada. …

“Not only would I predict that this paper will be highly cited in the scientific literature, but it will be distributed and consulted widely by government decision-makers responsible for the identification, protection and recovery of species at risk.”

The paper is in the November issue of BioScience, now available to online subscribers.