Postgraduate Students

Rachel Buxton is a PhD candidate from Vancouver, Canada. She is an avid traveller and loves seabird biology because it takes her to some of the most amazing far-reaching places in the world (like New Zealand)! She conducted her MSc research through Memorial University of Newfoundland and her fieldwork in the Aleutian Islands, Alaska. Her research focused on the use of passive acoustic monitoring as a tool to examine nocturnal seabird abundances on remote, hard-to-reach islands. Specifically, Rachel was interested in how nocturnal burrow-nesting seabirds (storm-petrels, Ancient Murrelets, and Cassin`s Auklets) were recovering after the removal of introduced Arctic Foxes. She compared call activity between a control island (predator free) and a chronosequence of predator-eradicated islands. Besides bioacoustics, Rachel is also interested in island restoration techniques, such as social attraction and translocation. She has fallen deeply in love with seabirds and seabird islands, and hopes to dedicate the rest of her life to studying them.