Sarah Wanless


Sarah Wanless is an animal ecologist in the UK and is an expert on seabirds; she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and is Honorary Professor at the Universities of Glasgow and Aberdeen.

Education and career

Wanless was born in Scarborough, England and moved to Aberdeen, Scotland in 1969 for her undergraduate degree and then her PhD, which focused on northern gannets over three seasons on the island of Ailsa Craig in the Firth of Clyde.
She worked at the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, the Nature Conservancy Council and the British Antarctic Survey before joining the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology permanently in 1996 as a Higher Scientific Officer. She rose to Individual Merit Scientist and retired in 2016 but is still involved with research as Emeritus Fellow at CEH.

Research

In the 1980s, Wanless began one of the first radio-tracking studies into seabirds in the Northern Hemisphere, which helped to identify the foraging areas and the dangers that seabirds face due to climate change, pollution, fishing and off-shore wind farms; much of this research was conducted on the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth in Scotland. She was the first female visiting scientist to the British Antarctic Survey's research station on Bird Island in South Georgia, where she studied the diving behaviour of South Georgia shags for two southern summers. Wanless also studied gannets on Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire and researched the foraging of puffins outside of the breeding season.
Over her career, Wanless published 250 papers, her bird tracking data was contributed to the Global Seabird Tracking Database.

Awards and Honours