Sarah Wanless

Sarah Wanless is a NERC Individual Merit Scientist at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology with >30 years experience of research in the North Atlantic. The aim of her work is to understand the impact of global change on marine top predators, particularly seabirds.  Most of her research is field-based, much of it focussed on CEH’s study site on the Isle of May, and utilising long term data on a wide range of seabirds including puffins, guillemots, kittiwakes, shags and gannets. However, her current research interests extend beyond the breeding season and use both traditional colour-ringing and novel bio-logging approaches to track individuals year round and/or during the prospecting phase of their lives. Her work has proved essential to the conservation of marine ecosystems and she produced scientific evidence resulting in the ban of sandeel fisheries in the western North Sea following catastrophic seabird breeding failures in Scotland. She has published >200 papers, with >5,000 citations (h-index 39).  She is committed to communicating science to a wide audience, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, an Honorary professor at the University of Aberdeen and received the Zoological Society of London Marsh Award for Conservation Biology in 2007.