Overview

Marine ecologist investigating movement and space-use of harbour seals around Irish waters, with an overarching aim to better understand interactions with anthropogenic activities, and improve conservation management.

Background

Sam graduated from her PhD in 2016 at Plymouth University, which focused on investigating links between physical oceanographic processes and the distributions and foraging behaviours of marine mammals and seabirds across shelf-seas.  Following this, she completed a 1.5 year post-doctoral position at CNRS in Chize (France), where she worked on juvenile southern elephant seals and aspects of their foraging behaviour/development and 1^st year survival.  She then completed a 2 year CNES funded fellowship at the IRD in Sete (France), focused on investigating the foraging ecology of booby seabirds across tropical island ecosystems of the Atlantic Ocean.  Generally, her research interests are focused on understanding the behaviours and distributions of marine vertebrate predators, to assess how these animals interact/are impacted by anthropogenic activities and environmental change (e.g. climate change, commercial fisheries, marine renewables), with an aim to improve conservation management.