Charles M. Francis
Adjunct Research Professor
| Degrees: | B.Sc. (Guelph), M.Sc. (Queen's), Ph.D. (Queen's) |
| Phone: | 613-899-6750 |
| Email: | Charles.Francis@ec.gc.ca |
| Office: | Manager, Wildlife Monitoring and Assessment Canadian Wildlife Service Environment and Climate Change Canada National Wildlife Research Centre Carleton University Campus Ottawa, Ontario, K1S 5B6 |
Current Research
My work with the Canadian Wildlife Service focusses on coordinating and managing wildlife monitoring programs in Canada, particularly for migratory birds, as well as developing innovative ways to improve wildlife monitoring programs. In addition to supporting long-term programs using traditional bird monitoring approaches, I am engaged in a variety of collaborative projects to improve bird monitoring approaches, particularly using technology. Some examples include use of aerial imagery to count cliff-nesting seabirds; use of synchronized arrays of autonomous recording units to study singing behaviour and detectability of songbirds on surveys; and use of weather radar to monitor bird migration, study stopover locations, and detect large roosts of migrating swallows. I am also involved in projects related to understanding threats and conservation needs for bats in North America, studying taxonomy and distribution of southeast Asian bats; and using integrated population models to combine observational data with long-term mark-recapture-recovery data sets to understand bird population dynamics, using a dataset for owls in Finland.
Graduate and Undergraduate Student Opportunities
I am willing to co-supervise graduate or undergraduate students, particularly those with good quantitative analysis skills, interested in working on applied questions related to the mandate of the Canadian Wildlife Service, particularly related to monitoring and conservation of migratory birds or bats. Projects could involve field work carried out by the students on their own or in collaboration with other teams, or they could involve analytic work using available datasets. Some examples of potential projects could include using microphone arrays to evaluate detection patterns of birds on acoustic surveys; using weather radar to study stopover habitats of migratory birds; evaluating different statistical approaches for analysing bird survey data; developing integrated population models to understand the population dynamics of wildlife populations; or assessing the value of different conservation actions to address threats to species of conservation concern.
Publications
Please see Google Scholar for a current list of scientific publications.
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