University College Cork

PhD (1982) on the topic of Ticks (Acarina: Ixoidea) and viruses of seabirds breeding in Ireland. I discovered at least four tick species which specialize on seabirds – three of which definitely transmit viruses to their hosts (Nuttall et al 1984a; Nuttall and Kelly, 1984). In fact there are a wide variety of tick borne viruses circulating at seabird colonies in Ireland and indeed elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. However, epidemics are either unknown or exceptionally rare at these breeding stations.

This fact lead me to collaborate with mathematicians in modeling the somewhat unusual situation obtaining at seabird colonies where reproductive output is so low that there is a very high ratio of adult (‘recovered’) to chicks (‘susceptibles’) of the order of 8:1 in order to explain the absence of epidemics despite remarkably high densities vectors and  hosts. The marine bird colony ratio can be compared with a rabbit warren where the ratio is likely to be of the order of >8 kittens to one adult. In cooperation with the Department of Applied Mathematics, School of Mathematics, University College Cork, we developed a number of models which went some way to explaining a)the absence of epidemics (due to the very low recruitment of susceptible) on the one hand, and b) the remarkable persistence of viruses including several strains of Influenza at seabird colonies.

In recent years the epidemiological research focus has been widened to include micro - and macro-parasites of shell fish and investigations of the behavioural ecology of wading birds and shore feeding crows.

In parallel I developed a research group looking at the problem of bird strikes to aircraft. The first conference paper was published in 1996 (Kelly et al. 1996) and subsequently (e.g. Kelly et al. 2001; O’Callaghan et al. 2001; Kelly and Allen, 2006). One PhD thesis based on this topic has been completed. The bird strike work is ongoing and has included some modeling of one of the major emerging bird strike species – the woodpigeon (O’ Regan et al. 2012). Conference presentations have been made at Boston, Toronto, FERA York, UK; Baltimore and St Louis, USA; Victoria, and Calgary, Canada; EASA Cologne (on behalf of the Irish Aviation Authority) and the European Space Agency in Holland.  

In addition I supervised an MSc thesis on the diet and breeding biology of Great Black-backed, and a PhD thesis on Lesser Black-backed Gulls. Subsequently, and more recently, five additional Marine Biology MSc theses have quantified the diets of Larus canus, fuscus, argentatus and marinus as well as Chroicephalus ridibundus.  I have also supervised an MSc thesis (in collaboration with Professor John O’Halloran) on the breeding biology of Roseate and Sandwich Terns.

I have been a member of Professor John O’Halloran’s research group (in collaboration with Trinity College, Dublin, University College Dublin and the University of Limerick) whose main focus has been on biodiversity in Ireland’s forests including those composed of introduced conifer species; this research has led to an extensive and varied list of publications in the international peer -reviewed literature (e.g. Cooke et.al.2013) and numerous PhD and MSc theses.

This research also included investigations into the biology of the Hen Harrier. In addition I jointly supervised a PhD theses on the Chough, woodland birds and ground and canopy dwelling arthropods.

Most recently I have co-supervised a project on Long Distance Dispersal (LDD) which is ongoing (Coughland et al. 2014).

I am also interested in models of memory (Pimenov et al. 2012) and threshold effects in disease and wildlife hazards to aviation (Kalachev et al. 2012).