Isla Margaret Graham

University of Aberdeen | ABDN · Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences

Mitigation measures to disperse marine mammals prior to pile-driving include acoustic deterrent devices and piling soft starts, but their efficacy remains uncertain. We developed a self-contained portable hydrophone cluster to detect small cetacean movements from the distributions of bearings to detections. Using an array of clusters within 10 km o...

With increasing numbers of offshore structures being installed and decommissioned, a better understanding of their effect on marine predators is timely. There is some evidence that oil and gas platforms may attract marine mammals, acting as artificial reefs. However, it is unclear whether different man-made structure designs have similar effects or...

Given the patchiness and long-term predictability of marine resources, memory of high-quality foraging grounds is expected to provide fitness advantages for central place foragers. However, it remains challenging to characterize how marine predators integrate memory with recent prey encounters to adjust fine-scale movement and use of foraging patch...

Offshore windfarm developments are expanding, requiring assessment and mitigation of impacts on protected species. Typically, assessments of impacts on marine mammals have focused on pile-driving, as intense impulsive noise elicits adverse behavioral responses. However, other construction activities such as jacket and turbine installation also chan...

Increasing levels of anthropogenic underwater noise have caused concern over their potential impacts on marine life. Offshore renewable energy developments and seismic exploration can produce impulsive noise which is especially hazardous for marine mammals because it can induce auditory damage at shorter distances and behavioral disturbance at long...

Understanding why animals move as they do when searching for resources is a central question in ecology, and a prerequisite for the development of predictive process-based models for conservation and management. Many species are central-place foragers (CPF). While several models for CPFs have been proposed, they often assume well-defined return rul...

1. Offshore windfarms require construction procedures that minimize impacts on protected marine mammals. Uncertainty over the efficacy of existing guidelines for mitigating near-field injury when pile-driving recently resulted in the development of alternative measures, which integrated the routine deployment of acoustic deterrent devices (ADD) int...

Estimating impacts of offshore windfarm construction on marine mammals requires data on displacement in relation to different noise levels and sources. Using echolocation detectors and noise recorders, we investigated harbour porpoise behavioural responses to piling noise during the 10-month foundation installation of a North Sea windfarm. Current...

Supplementary plots and tables

Environmental cycles often influence the presence of animals, creating patterns at different temporal scales, which may mean that their effects overlap and/or interact. Interactions between diel and seasonal cycles have been reported to influence fish behaviour but little is known about such interactions in marine top predators. Here, we studied th...

Seabirds are key marine top predator species that are often used as indicators of the environmental quality of the oceans. Their breeding phenology has been studied extensively, but their pelagic habits mean less is known about the phenology of other events during the non‐breeding period. Here, we used miniaturized saltwater immersion light‐based g...

The development of risk assessments for the exposure of protected populations to noise from coastal construction is constrained by uncertainty over the nature and extent of marine mammal responses to man-made noise. Stakeholder concern often focuses on the potential for local displacement caused by impact piling, where piles are hammered into the s...

We used passive acoustic monitoring data to explore the combined effect that environmental cycles have on the presence of bottlenose dolphins in the Moray Firth. Site specific results were obtained and patterns were consistent across years. We found a previously unreported seasonal shift in the diel behaviour in one site.

ABSTRACT: Robust information on animal distributions and foraging behaviour is required to target management and conservation measures for protected species and populations. Visual survey data are commonly used to model these distributions. However, because visual data can only be collected in daylight, modelled distributions and consequent managem...

1.Robust estimates of the density or abundance of cetaceans are required to support a wide range of ecological studies and inform management decisions. Considerable effort has been put into the development of line-transect sampling techniques to obtain estimates of absolute density from aerial and boat-based visual surveys. Surveys of cetaceans usi...

Many wildlife studies use chemical analyses to explore spatio-temporal variation in diet, migratory patterns and contaminant exposure. Intrinsic markers are particularly valuable for studying non-breeding marine predators, when direct methods of investigation are rarely feasible. However, any inferences regarding foraging ecology are dependent upon...

By linking iterative learning and knowledge generation with power-sharing, adaptive co-management (ACM) provides a potential solution to resolving complex social-ecological problems. In this paper we evaluate ACM as a mechanism for resolving conservation conflict using a case study in Scotland, where seal and salmon fishery stakeholders have opposi...

Animals exposed to anthropogenic disturbance make trade-offs between perceived risk and the cost of leaving disturbed areas. Impact assessments tend to focus on overt behavioural responses leading to displacement, but trade-offs may also impact individual energy budgets through reduced foraging performance. Previous studies found no evidence for br...

Understanding which environmental factors drive foraging preferences is critical for the development of effective management measures, but resource use patterns may emerge from processes that occur at different spatial and temporal scales. Direct observations of foraging are also especially challenging in marine predators, but passive acoustic tech...

Assessments of the impact of offshore energy developments are constrained because it is not known whether fine-scale behavioural responses to noise lead to broader-scale displacement of protected small cetaceans. We used passive acoustic monitoring and digital aerial surveys to study changes in the occurrence of harbour porpoises across a 2000 km(2...

The management of conflict between people and large carnivores frequently focuses on the selective removal of the so-called ‘problem’ or ‘rogue’ animals. However, the existence of such individuals has rarely been examined. Recent management of seal–salmon fishery conflict in Scotland follows this approach, and under the Moray Firth Seal Management...

The Moray Firth Seal Management Plan (MFSMP) was introduced in Scotland in 2005 as a pilot for resolving conflict between Atlantic salmon fisheries and conservation imperatives for protected harbour and grey seals. This adaptive co-management model is now being applied nationally through the Marine (Scotland) Act (2010). However, no information exi...

Supplementary feeding studies are widely used to assess the effects of food availability on herbivore population dynamics. Supplementary feeding studies make the implicit and often untested assumption that supplementary feed is used by the target population. Here we describe and present the results of a supplementary feeding experiment to assess th...

Graham, I. M., Harris, R. N., Denny, B., Fowden, D., and Pullan, D. 2009. Testing the effectiveness of an acoustic deterrent device for excluding seals from Atlantic salmon rivers in Scotland. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 66: 860–864. In Scotland, there is frequent conflict between salmon rod fisheries and seals, which is often managed by the...

The role of food in limiting or regulating populations of mammalian herbivores remains a central question in ecology with great relevance to wildlife and livestock management. Supplementary feeding studies have been widely used to assess the potentially limiting role of food availability, and supplementary feeding is also a common management techni...

1.Within the Moray Firth, north-east Scotland, there is a history of conflict between seals and salmon fisheries. Under the UK's Conservation of Seals Act 1970 (CoSA) seals are shot to protect fisheries. In 1999 six rivers in the Moray Firth were designated as Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) for Atlantic salmon under the EU Habitats Directive,...

Abstract Bioenergetics were used to model the potential impacts on adult Atlantic salmon, Salmo salar L., stocks and rod fisheries of removing harbour seals, Phoca vitulina L., from three rivers of different scales in the Moray Firth, Scotland, viz: the Spey (large), Conon (medium) and Moriston (small). Overall, seals had the greatest impact on the...

The possible role of pathogens in rodent population cycles has been largely neglected since Elton's 'epidemic hypothesis' of 1931. To revisit this question, 12 adjacent, cyclic but out-of-phase populations of field voles (Microtus agrestis) in North East England were studied and the initial results are presented here. The prevalences of antibodies...

Foraging theory predicts that mobile predators such as raptors should hunt more frequently in habitat patches yielding the greatest energy gains. Raptor foraging distributions may, however, be constrained by nest location and by competition between different raptor species. We tested these hypotheses in a moorland raptor assemblage including two vo...

Quantifying the abundance of small mustelids is important both for conservation purposes and for our understanding of ecosystem processes. Footprint tunnel tracking is one of the techniques now used to index the relative abundance of small mammals; however, there have been few or no previous attempts to calibrate indices of mustelid abundance deriv...

Summary • The delayed density-dependent predation of specialists such as weasels (Mustela nivalis L.) may result in cycles in the abundance of their prey. We estimated the demographic impact of weasel predation on field-vole (Microtus agrestis L.) survival using capture–recapture data from a large-scale, replicated predator-manipulation experiment...

Mycobacterium microti (vole tuberculosis) infections in small wild mammals were first described more than 60 years ago in several populations in Great Britain. Few studies of vole tuberculosis have been undertaken since then, and little is known about the relationship between M. microti isolates originating from different populations or at differen...

Spotted hyaenas, Crocuta crocuta, are gregarious carnivores whose social lives share much in common with those of cercopithecine primates. We conducted playback experiments to determine whether free-living hyaenas are capable of identifying individual conspecifics on the basis of their long-distance vocalization, the ‘whoop’. When prerecorded cub w...

In their response to Oli [1], Korpimä ki et al. [2] raised several specific criticisms of our work [3] to which we respond briefly here. They claimed that our weasel removal experiment was performed at too small a spatial scale; however, they failed to allow for the spatial asynchrony in vole dynamics observed in Kielder Forest (KF) [4]. According...

The diet and breeding density of 19 pairs of Common Buzzard Buteo buteo¸ were studied in relation to indices of lagomorph and vole abundance during June July 1993 in a range of habitats in southern Scotland. Lagomorphs, voles and birds formed over 70% of the food items analysed from prey remains and pellets collected at nest sites. Indices of prey...

Polybutadienes having a variety of different microstructures have been hydrosilated using HSiMexCl3 –x, x= 0–2 in the presence of H2[PtCl6]. High conversions of double bonds pendant from the main chain are observed but hydrosilation also occurs on the backbone of the polymer especially if there is a high percentage of backbone double bonds. This ba...