Daniel Rea. Photo credit. Kira Koop.

The Bill Buxton Dissertation Award is given out annually to one outstanding doctoral dissertation in the Human-Computer Interaction research area of Computing Science. It is presented by the Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society. This is the first year that the award has been granted to a member of the University of Manitoba.

Daniel Rea received the Award for the 2020 doctoral dissertation, “Now You’re Teleoperating with Power: learning from video games to improve teleoperation interfaces,” completed under the supervision of Dr. Jim Young in the UM Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCI).

Born and raised in Winnipeg, Rea says computer science was a natural fit, because of its focus on problem-solving.

“I ended up getting into human-computer interaction because, in the end, technology is for making people’s lives better, so we need to consider the needs of people at all stages of technology development.”

Rea completed three degrees at the University of Manitoba, during which time Rea interned in Calgary, the University of Tokyo and more. Rea is now looking forward to beginning his new career as an Assistant Professor at the University of New Brunswick, after completing a post-doctorate position at Kyoto University, in Japan.

“I hope to continue making robots that can create helpful, engaging, and meaningful experiences for all sorts of people while contributing back to my friends, colleagues, and communities in Canada, Japan, and around the world.”

For more information please visit the Bill Buxton Award website.

It’s satisfying then, that Johnson-Bice’s most recent research article on wolves has garnered him and his co-authors a spot in the American Association of the Advancement of Sciences’ journal, Science Advances. Entitled “Outsized effect of predation: Wolves alter wetland creation and recolonization by killing ecosystem engineers”, it summarizes the research done by Johnson-Bice and colleagues into the predatory behaviour of gray wolves on beavers, and how this interaction affects wetlands in and around Voyageurs National Park.

Johnson-Bice’s formal study of canid behaviour began in the spring of 2015 when he was hired as a biological science technician for Voyageurs National Park, in International Falls, Minnesota. Biologists at the park had been monitoring the wolf population since 2012 when gray wolves were first delisted from the Endangered Species Act. Initial efforts focused more on monitoring efforts — trying to understand such things as how many packs were in the park, the packs’ boundaries and how many wolves were in each pack.

In Fall 2016, Johnson-Bice started his studies at the University of Minnesota. His MSc research concentrated on the population and spatial dynamics of beavers in other regions of Minnesota. Since his MSc advisor (Steve Windels, a co-author on the wolf predation paper) was the head wildlife biologist for Voyageurs National Park, Johnson-Bice was able to stay current on the research, returning to work there during the summers of 2018 and 2019.

Called the Voyageurs Wolf Project, it is a collaborative effort between the University of Minnesota (led by Tom Gable, Prof. Joe Bump, and Austin Homkes), Voyageurs National Park (Steve Windels), and several other researchers including Johnson-Bice. The park has one of the densest beaver populations in the United States, with a rich history of beaver research dating back to the ‘80s. Johnson-Bice says the recent focus on wolf-related research is relatively new.

“The specific inquiries into wolf-beaver interactions started with Tom Gable’s work in 2015. It was definitely a struggle at first for all of us — no one had ever really studied wolf-beaver interactions before, so there was no blueprint about how to do it.”

Most current research on wolf-beaver interactions focuses on understanding the methods wolves use to hunt beavers, as well as the investigation of kill sites. This paper describes how wolves can alter pond creation by killing beavers. Although it wasn’t the original focus of the project, the publication of this study has made the question of how wolves influence wetland creation a major component of the long-term project goals.

Johnson-Bice’s contributions focus on understanding the ecological effects of wolf-beaver interactions and how this relationship affects boreal forest ecosystems. To date, very little research has been done on predator-ecosystem engineer dynamics. His work is amongst the first to evaluate this relationship in depth.

“Beavers are arguably the most prolific and widespread ecosystem engineers in terrestrial ecosystems, so they are an excellent model species to evaluate predator-ecosystem engineer dynamics.”

Beaver Carcass. Beavers reshape landscapes by building dams. But wolves prey on the ecological engineers, limiting where they live. Photo supplied.

That’s not to say that research into beavers is easy. The search for kill sites during the summertime is gruelling. The monitored wolves are fitted with GPS collars which record their locations approximately every 20 minutes. Johnson-Bice and his colleagues visited every place where a wolf recorded at least two GPS points within 200 metres of one another (spots commonly referred to as “GPS clusters”). Each day the team would load the GPS clusters onto their handheld GPS units, then bushwhack their way out to every such site.  Johnson-Bice likens the work to that of a crime scene investigator.

“With small prey like beavers and deer fawns, the wolves will often consume the entire animal, leaving very little evidence of the ‘crime’ that occurred. Oftentimes we only find a tuft of hair, a couple of bone fragments, or maybe even a few drops of fresh blood, if you’re lucky. So at each cluster, we walk through it slowly and methodically, putting together these small pieces of evidence to determine whether a kill occurred there or not.”

In fact, the methods that the researchers developed for finding kill sites of these small organisms are so unique to the study that it is crucial to train new team members in their use. Each new technician joining the project gets put through a “boot camp” of finding kill sites.

Sean Johnson-Bice, University of Manitoba, PhD student.

While Johnson-Bice feels that the results of this study won’t be particularly surprising to anyone familiar with wolves and beavers, he has discovered something he finds intriguing.

“Wolves and other large predators are primarily thought to impact ecosystems by altering the abundance or behaviour of their prey, which can have cascading effects down the trophic levels. But in Voyageurs, our research suggests wolves do not kill enough beavers to affect their abundance. So the fact that we have convincingly shown wolves can impact wetlands without necessarily changing the abundance or behaviour of beavers is an exciting finding.”

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What’s it all about? It involves experiencing research alongside a professor and their team for 16 weeks in a placement that runs from May to August. Research is meant in the broadest sense and includes research, scholarly activities and creative works.

The award is competitive and criteria can be found on the URA webpage. Deadline to apply is January 25, 2021 at 4:30 PM (CST)– but do not procrastinate – because more than an application form is involved!

What will this experience look like during the current pandemic? All award recipients undertook their summer 2020 placements. Many of them chose to participate in the recent Undergraduate Research Poster Competition to showcase their research findings. Students who competed presented research that ranged from using machine learning to detect breast cancer to the effects of oil drilling noise on birds to exploring challenges faced by the charitable food sector in Manitoba during the first wave of the pandemic.

One such student was Lindsay Mamchur, who took home 3^rd Prize in the Creative Works category. She undertook a project on photography and the built environment under the mentorship of Dr. Susan Close (Environmental Design).

Lisa Mamchur (Architecture), Undergraduate Research Award recipient, at work summer 2020.

“In this research experience, I have found people, projects, and ideas to carry forward,” said Mamchur. “For example, Kenneth O’Halloran’s series The Handball Alley and Robert Adams’ The New West move me to engage their representations of landscape in my studio coursework. Also, exploring these photographers has encouraged me to commit to my own practice of photography. This experience could mean opening doors to study and career paths I had not previously considered.”

To read more about Mamchur’s research project and her reflections on the URA as a good mentorship opportunity to discover interests that can become the subjects of long-term study and a fulfilling career, read her blog.