Bonnycastle Fellowship for Wetland and Waterfowl Research

Supports talented young professionals who are dedicated to furthering conservation in North America.

About the fellowship

This fellowship honours the conservation vision of Richard H. G. Bonnycastle.

Mr. Bonnycastle was a dedicated conservationist who served as president for Ducks Unlimited Canada from 1957 to 1960. The purpose of the Bonnycastle Fellowship for Wetland and Waterfowl Research is to support talented young professionals who are dedicated to furthering conservation in North America and advancing our scientific understanding of wetland and waterfowl biology.

The competition is open to graduate students based at any North American university.

The award of up to $8,000 per year (Canadian funds) is available to provide personal or research support for successful applicants. The award is renewable for up to two additional years for PhD students and once for Master’s students, assuming annual approval of a satisfactory progress report and the need for continuing financial support.

It will be awarded based upon the following criteria:

Applicant qualifications
Scientific soundness of the research proposal
Originality and creativity in study design
Expected contributions to wetland or waterfowl ecology
The importance of the proposed research to conservation
Achievability of the work

Interested in applying or have any questions?

Take your research to the next level. Apply for a Ducks Unlimited fellowship.

View details

Recent fellowship winner

Mel Baldino

For their PhD research at the University of California Berkley, Mel will evaluate whether and how wetlands restored to maximize carbon sequestration also support biodiversity, including waterfowl.

Extensive wetland drainage in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta has compromised the provisioning of wetland ecosystem services. Some wetlands have been restored to prevent additional carbon losses and facilitate blue carbon storage, and more wetland restoration is planned for the coming decades. It is unclear whether restoration techniques designed to maximize carbon sequestration similarly benefit biodiversity in these restored wetlands. Mel will leverage remote sensing, field surveys, and wetland productivity models to characterize habitat and quantify bird diversity and wetland carbon. Their work will identify wetland restoration and management techniques that provide win-win solutions for carbon and bird biodiversity.

Hannah Sabatier

Hannah’s PhD research at the University of Saskatchewan will compare and provide insights into key datasets that inform management of North American waterfowl.

Sound waterfowl conservation and management decisions are underpinned by reliable data and it is important to understand how different kinds of data — collected at different scales, using different methods — may provide different insights. Hannah will investigate how locally measured nest survival rates relate to regional indicators of reproductive success like age ratios at banding and harvest and continental population indicators like the Waterfowl Breeding Population and Habitat Survey and banding-derived Lincoln-Petersen abundance estimates. To do this, she will:

Calculate nest survival estimates for the most common dabbling duck species in the Prairie Pothole Region (i.e., a local measure of reproductive success)
Evaluate the concordance among multiple waterfowl monitoring programs
Assess how environmental conditions, species ecology, and methodological bias contribute to similarities and discrepancies among metrics
Consider how factors during the non-breeding period (e.g., habitat selection, environmental drivers) and individual behaviour can scale up to affect population trends.

Hannah’s research will provide important insights into the data that drive habitat and harvest management of North American waterfowl and, by identifying where nest success scales to population performance, identify areas of high return on investment for waterfowl conservation.

Past Winners of the Bonnycastle Fellowship for Wetland and Waterfowl Research

2023-2025: Corinne Sweeney, PhD. Evaluating toxicity implications of wetland sediment insecticide concentrations on benthic aquatic insects and temporal changes in aquatic invertebrate communities in Missouri wetland ecosystems, University of Missouri.

2021-2022: Brett Leach, MSc. Quantifying blue-winged teal migration routes, phenology, and habitat selection patterns at important staging and wintering areas, University of Missouri

Past Winners of the Bonnycastle Fellowship for Prairie Ecosystem Studies

2018-2020: Samantha Fino, PhD. Evaluating relationships between predator community dynamics and duck nest survival in eastern South Dakota, South Dakota State University

2016-2017: Christine Rohal, PhD. Invasive Phragmites australis Management in Great Salt Lake Wetlands: Context Dependency and Scale Effects on Vegetation and Seed Banks, Utah State University

2014-2016: Hannah Specht, PhD. Occupancy of wetland dependent waterbirds in the Bakken Oil Field, North Dakota: Developing methods to assess impacts on low density, low detection species of concern, University of Minnesota

2011-2013: Lauren Bortolotti, PhD. The recovery of ecosystem function and biodiversity in restored prairie wetlands, University of Alberta

2006-2008: Ryan Fisher, PhD. Effect of landscape composition on habitat selection of grassland birds, University of Regina

Institute for Wetland and Waterfowl Research

Bonnycastle Fellowship for Wetland and Waterfowl Research

About the fellowship

Interested in applying or have any questions?

Recent fellowship winner

Past Winners of the Bonnycastle Fellowship for Wetland and Waterfowl Research

Past Winners of the Bonnycastle Fellowship for Prairie Ecosystem Studies

Institute for Wetland and Waterfowl Research

About us

Research

Fellowships