Polar bear biologist wins achievement award

Dr. Ian Stirling has been awarded the Weston Family Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Northern Research for his decades of work studying Arctic marine mammals. (PHOTO COURTESY POLARBEARSINTERNATIONAL.ORG)

Canadian polar bear scientist Dr. Ian Stirling has won his year’s Weston Family Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Northern Research, along with its $50,000 cash prize.

The annual Weston prize was awarded to Stirling this week as part of ArcticNet’s 2015 annual scientific meeting in Vancouver.

Stirling, an adjunct professor of in the University of Alberta’s biology department, has spent decades studying the ecology and behaviour of Arctic marine mammals, with a special focus on polar bears.

“Dr. Stirling’s rigorous research has led to findings that are significant to the preservation and management of Arctic marine mammals,” said Geordie Dalglish, the director of the W. Garfield Weston Foundation, which funds the prize, in a Dec. 9 release.

“We are deeply honoured to award him with this Lifetime Achievement Prize in recognition of his significant contribution to our understanding of Canada’s North.”

Stirling was among the first scientists in Canada to identify a correlation between the decline of a polar bear population and climate change.

If the globe continues to warm at its current rate, Stirling predicts that the majority of polar bear populations won’t survive until the end of the century, with the last survivors remaining in the Canadian Arctic and in Greenland.

But Stirling’s research, particularly that focused on the decline of the western Hudson Bay polar bear population, has been controversial in Nunavut, where Government of Nunavut research and traditional Inuit knowledge have found the same bear population “abundant.”

Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. said Stirling’s “faulty predictions” have hurt Inuit harvesting.

Past winners of the same Weston Family Prize include ArcticNet director Dr. Louis Fortier and biologist Dr. Charles Krebs.