User:Oceanflynn/sandbox/Justina C. Ray

Justina C. Ray is a Toronto-Ontario-based expert in wildlife ecology and conservation. She has served as President and Senior scientist at Wildlife Conservation Society Canada WCS Canada since its incorporation in 2004. She served as co-chair of Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada's Terrestrial Mammals Specialist Subcommittee for nine years from 2009 to 2017. She served as their point of contact scientist on matters related to caribou and other terrestrial mammals.

Education
Ray completed her B.S. Biology (with honors) at Stanford University in 1987. She earned her Masters in Science from Stanford Universityin 1987 with Robert M. Sapolsky as supervisor. She completed her PhD in Wildlife Ecology & Conservation, with a Certificate in African Studies from the University of Florida in 1996. Her PhD thesis was on carnivores, such as the mongoose, in a Central African rainforest. She became fluent in Sangho, the CAR language.

Career
From 1998 to 2001, Ray was the co-principal investigator in Central African Republic doing research on the "impacts of interacting disturbances on African forest mammal communities." where she became fluent in Sangho.

In 2008, Ray was an "Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Forestry, University of Toronto, and a Research Associate at the Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Biology at the Royal Ontario Museum." She has also been an Adjunct Professor at Trent University's Environmental & Life Sciences Graduate Program.

Research
Ray's focus has been on "conservation planning in northern landscapes, with a particular focus on wolverine and caribou." She "worked for years in African and Asian tropical forests." "North America has been her predominant geographic focus over the past decade. The questions that drive her research are rooted in evaluating the role of shifting landscapes in biodiversity decline and/or change in forested ecosystems. These issues include quantifying the impacts of development activities on biodiversity, including effects of forest changes on mammal population and community structure, and monitoring of species at risk."

Wildlife Conservation Society Canada
Ray has been with the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada as President and senior scientist since it was incorporated in 2004.

COSEWIC
From 2009 to 2017, Ray was co-chair of COSEWIC's Terrestrial Mammals Specialist Subcommittee from 2009 to 2017. COSEWIC is the "body that undertakes assessments of Canada’s wildlife species under the federal Species at Risk Act." In November 2011, COSEWIC voted to accept the Designatable Unit (DU) structure for caribou in Canada based on the Terrestrial Mammals Specialist Subcommittee's report. In her presentation at the 14th North American Caribou Workshop in November 2012, Justina Ray described her work with COSEWIC in developing the twelve designatable units (DUs) for caribou in Canada. In a 2019 Globe and Mail article, Ray explained that the 11 designatable units are categorized as "distinct because of a combination of their habitat, ecology and genetic differences. Some units contain only one herd; larger units have dozens."

In her October 31, 2018 article in Canadian Geographic, Ray described how their "single most challenging task was systematically evaluating the status of these 11 groups of caribou. The committee did this through the production of six status assessment reports during the period from 2012 to 2017, which involved the collective efforts of hundreds of people. For each report, it took two to three years to assemble the data (including Indigenous knowledge), then compile them into a comprehensive report, subject the report to robust review, before finally delivering the results to the COSEWIC table for a vote on status.

Affiliations
She is research associate at the Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Biology at the Royal Ontario Museum.

Publications
Ray has authored or co-authored "more than 40 book chapter, journal, or popular articles" and three books. In 2008 Ray co-authored Caribou and the North: a shared future with Monte Hummel with forwards by Robert Redford and Stephen Kakfwi and illustrations by Robert Bateman. A review in described the book as an "authoritative volume" on caribou, and "its significance to northern ecology, and human impacts and reliance on it." "Hummel and Ray have included an entire chapter that outlines plans, policy suggestions, and responsibilities for various groups and institutions, both public and private, that if implemented would improve the fate of caribou in the north." She was co-editor of Noninvasive Survey Methods for Carnivores in 2008 and Large Carnivores and the Conservation of Biodiversity in 2005. In her May 16, 2019 article in The Narwhal, Ray described how the recovery planning for endangered caribou in the southern part of British Columbia which began in 2003, has not made much progress "until very recently".