DURHAM, N.C. – Lesley Thorne, a PhD student in marine science and conservation at 51’s Nicholas School of the Environment, has received a 2010 Mia J. Tegner Memorial Research Grant.

The $9,600 award will support her research on “A Retrospective Analysis of the Historical Abundance of a Pelagic Shorebird: Unanticipated Effects of Fisheries Management Failures?”

Thorne is based at the 51 Marine Lab in Beaufort, N.C.  Her research focuses on the use of spatial analysis and landscape ecology techniques in marine ecosystems, and the importance of oceanographic features and associated prey distributions to the foraging habitat of top predators, with a special focus on foraging seabirds and their prey in Onslow Bay, N.C., and the Bay of Fundy in Canada.

Tegner Memorial Research Grants are awarded annually by the Marine Conservation Biology Institute of Bellevue, Wash., to support research in marine environmental history and historical marine ecology that has strong conservation implications, particularly in helping policymakers, resource managers and others set appropriate targets for marine conservation policies and programs.  The grants are named in honor of Mia J. Tegner, a marine biologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography who lost her life in 2001 while diving off of Southern California.

In addition to her studies of foraging seabirds, Thorne has co-authored two peer-reviewed publications on cetaceans with Marine Lab faculty members Doug Nowacek, Dave Johnston and Andy Read, and she is working on research projects to investigate the distribution of cetaceans in waters surrounding the main and Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.