Parker Levinson is one of Conservation Nation’s 2022 Emerging Conservationist grant winners. She grew up in Monterey, California, and received her B.A. in environmental sciences from Northwestern University in 2018.
Parker has worked on long-term population monitoring projects worldwide—from leatherback sea turtles in Equatorial Guinea to Adélie penguins in Antarctica. These experiences led her to develop a deep appreciation for using longitudinal data to measure changes in wildlife populations. She recently enrolled in the Fish and Wildlife Management graduate program at Montana State University to participate in the long-established Weddell Seal Research Project in Erebus Bay, Antarctica.
Tagging and Monitoring of Weddell Seal Pups
Parker will lead a five-person team to Erebus Bay in eastern Antarctica to participate in a long-term capture-mark-recapture study on the world’s southernmost population of Weddell seals. Her team will collect data by attaching plastic livestock ID tags to all newborn pups and recording every seal sighted to help measure population-level responses to environmental variations over time. Parker will use some of the data for her own research into factors that affect productivity—that is, the number of pups produced each year—such as climate-change-induced sea level rise and increased sea surface temperatures. She believes that understanding how Weddell seals respond to potential future climatic changes such as these will help inform conservation goals for the region. Funding from this grant will help her overcome various challenges related to living expenses, purchasing field gear, and course fees. She will also use funds to create a web-based database where the public and other researchers can see any seal’s reproductive history and long-term movement patterns.
