Kate Sherren

Landscapes - People - Global change

Tag: quantitative social science

Causeway-related surveys in the field

March 27, 2024 /

Postcard invitations being sent to those living within about 4 km of each causeway.

Over the next couple of weeks, residents living near the Petitcodiac River causeway (partially replaced with the Honourable Brenda Robertson Bridge) in New Brunswick and the Avon River causeway in Nova Scotia will receive post cards from my lab. PhD student Keahna Margeson is running a study to understand peoples’ experiences and perceptions of changes to the causeways, tidal gates, and rivers over the years. If you get one of these in your mailbox, and you have 10-15 minutes to spare, we would be very grateful to hear from you. 

Addendum April 8th: These postcards have gone out to those on mail routes within–or that touch–a 4 km buffer of each causeway site. Mail routes in rural areas can be quite large. With Canada Post Admail we cannot control the outer edge of the distribution, and so you may have received the postcard even at a significant distance from a causeway site, but we are still very interested to hear from you. Many thanks for your support.

New survey in the field on perceptions of flood mapping

January 29, 2021 /
Survey notice that will start arriving in mailboxes next week

Survey notice that will start arriving in mailboxes next week

If you get a card that looks like this in your mail, please don’t ignore it. Environmental Science Honours student Samantha Howard is now waiting eagerly for responses to her survey invitation, which will start arriving in the mailboxes of Bridgewater and Liverpool, NS, early next week. She is interested to know how residents feel about the possibility of flood risk mapping being made publicly available for their property, perhaps even required as a disclosure during home sales or rental agreements.

We are sending this survey invitation out via a Canada Post admail postcard, to avoid multiple handling and any envelope licking at this time of COVID, which I have never tried before. We hope for a good response rate so Samantha can analyze the results statistically, and are grateful to those who are willing to give their time. The survey closes on February 14, to leave enough time for analysis and writing before Sam’s thesis is due the following month. There are 10 Tim Horton’s gift cards to be given away to respondents who decide to enter our draw at the end of the survey. The first 100 respondents have a 1 in 20 chance of winning a $20 card, the rest go into a draw for 5 $10 cards.

Angling for answers

July 24, 2017 /
Bilingual material about making space for shorebirds to rest this migration season.

Bilingual material about making space for shorebirds to rest this migration season.

As shorebirds start to arrive in the Bay of Fundy on their annual migration back south, it is a good time to report on our recent survey with striped bass anglers and outline our plans for the summer. We implemented an online survey with anglers who use key roosting sites in the Minas Basin, particularly ‘the Guzzle‘, to help us explore options for sharing beach space with migrating shorebirds at their high-tide resting period. This was in lieu of trying to assemble a workshop or focus group. The response was excellent, and we are now sharing the results here (PDF). On the basis of this feedback, and engagement with beach users in Avonport, our other key site, we have developed bilingual materials (above) that explain why, where and how to help shorebirds rest to ensure a successful migration back south: it’s a three-day trip over the Gulf of Mexico and they can’t swim! With anglers and other beach users we have identified lesser-used areas of each site to pilot setting aside at high tide for shorebird roosting, The back of the above card features a tide table that shows the times in August 2017 that we hope people will leave the sites for bird use, and signs at each place will explain further. We enjoyed this process of developing conservation ideas WITH beach users, many of whom are already great stewards of these birds. Space to Roost researcher Jaya Fahey will then be monitoring bird disturbance this year, as she did last year, and we’ll hope to see a difference.

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