About Pelican Science
Pelican Science was founded in 2017 with a mission dedicated to research, education and conservation of brown pelicans and our coastal environment.
Deborah Jaques is the founder of Pelican Science and owner of Pacific Eco Logic. She has spent her career researching and monitoring waterbirds, especially California brown pelicans. She received a master’s degree from UC Davis where she focused on brown pelican communal roosting and non-breeding range dynamics. Deborah has served as a seabird expert on eight major oil spills, performing natural r
Amelia DuVall is a quantitative ecologist and PhD candidate in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington. She uses quantitative methods to understand the status and drivers of seabird populations and decision-analytic methods to inform management actions to conserve populations. To date, her work has focused on seabird conservation in the Pacific Ocean, including t
Dr. Tammy Russell is a postdoctoral researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She obtained her B.S. from UC Santa Cruz, and her M.S. and PhD from Scripps. Her research focuses on the habitat use and foraging ecology of seabirds along the west coast of North America and Antarctic Peninsula.
Kyra Mills earned her Masters degree from UC Irvine, where she studied the foraging ecology of seabirds in the Galapagos Islands. She has extensive experience in seabird conservation and oiled wildlife response, including serving as lead seabird biologist on the Farallon Islands, a member of PRBO’s cadre of trained Wildlife Processing Unit personnel for oil spill response, and has worked with the
Helen Anderson, Social Media Manager & Photographer.
Helen received a Bachelor’s of Arts from UC Davis in Psychology with an emphasis in Child Development and a minor in Art Studio. She has worked as a K-6th Art Teacher, Preschool Teacher and was a Family Support Worker for Head Start. Helen is passionate about environmental education, conservation biology, and the intersection of art and scienc
Dr. Dan Anderson, Chief Scientific Advisor
In 1968, Joseph J. Hickey and then graduate student, Dan Anderson, were the first biologists to hypothesize and document a specific link between DDE and widespread eggshell thinning in birds; they also confirmed time-related trends first seen and reported in Europe in 1967, that eggshell thinning was widespread in certain birds throughout North America and elsewhere. This must have been good enough for Dan’s PhD. thesis, and he left the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1971 as a budding Research Biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, working on pesticide contaminants in wildlife of California and Mexico, primarily to study and document contaminant changes in the then-endangered Brown Pelican. In CA, he and co-workers documented the amazing decline of DDT and other contaminants, and resultant beginnings of the recovery of the Brown Pelican in the Southern California Bight. During that time, Anderson and his co-workers also published papers on the dynamics and effects of agricultural contaminants in migratory waterbirds, and conducted contaminant studies in California on other waterbirds and raptors.
In 1976, Anderson joined the faculty at the University of California Davis and has been there ever since, continuing his contaminant work and conducting long-term studies of seabird populations, El Niño effects, human disturbance effects, marine bird habitat selection, migration and movements of seabirds, and related work, much of it in Baja California and the Gulf of California, Clear Lake and the Klamath Basin in CA. He is a former Director of the Ecotoxicology Program at UC Davis and former Chair of his department. He taught an undergraduate course in Wildlife Ecotoxicology and a graduate seminar in Ecotoxicology, as well as having served as Chairperson of the Ecotoxicology “area of emphasis” in the Ecology Graduate Group at UCD and then directed the Ecotoxicology Program at UCD. Anderson also taught courses in Ornithology and avian biology, field techniques, and scientific writing.
Anderson’s current research still involves studies of contamination effects, distribution, and dynamics of organic and inorganic materials in birds from California and Baja California coastal and wetland environments, including the Klamath Basin, Clear Lake, San Joaquin Valley, and Rio Colorado Delta/Gulf of California region. Anderson is also actively involved in the conservation and management of avian populations and their habitats, and now in retirement emphasizes marine bird ecology and management. Anderson is currently continuing a five-decade study of Western North American Brown Pelicans. He is now retired, but is also involved in the conservation and management of avian populations and their habitats.
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