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On Monday, Nov. 3, Dr. Richard Stillman, of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Dorset, Winfrith Technology Centre, England, will be visiting Margaret Rubega's lab. Richard's work is focused on ecological modeling; he has worked intensively on foraging models, with particular attention to individual-based modelling and decision making by animals. He has collaborated extensively with John Goss-Custard, whose position he filled at Goss-Custard's retirement.
Margaret persuaded him to give a special seminar, titled "Using behaviour to predict the response of animal populations to environmental change", at noon, Monday (Nov. 3rd), in TLS 301. If you're interested, you won't even have to leave your seat after Monday's lecture.
John Silander has suggested two short papers to accompany his lecture on Wednesday. The links are now posted. I'll be posting some notes on species invasions tomorrow that you may want to look at, too.
Today's notes are up, too. I'll post notes on invasives some time later this week, but John Silander will be giving the lecture. I hope to have suggested readings from him by late today or early tomorrow. Stay tuned!
The suggested readings for today's lecture are now available. This year's version of the notes may not be available until this afternoon, but the ones from 2001 are available and the new ones won't be too different. If you're printing the notes, though, I suggest you wait until the new ones are posted.
Project #2 is now available. Follow the links for tomorrow's (27 October) lecture.
Tomorrow's lecture notes and readings are still being revised. I'll have them updated before lecture tomorrow. Sorry for the delay.
Updated notes and suggested readings for Wednesday, 10/22 are now available. Given that I want to finish our discussion of reserve design principles and go over the Massachusetts BioMap program, we're not likely to cover the ecosystem management notes in detail. I hope you'll still want to take a look at them.
I'm making progress on having the papers graded. If my strength holds out (or if I get up really early tomorrow morning) I'll be able to hand them back tomorrow. If you see this message before lecture tomorrow, I'd like you to think about one thing. It's possible that I'll have all except 3-4 of the papers graded. If that's the case, I'll give you the following option:
Without letting anyone know whether they're one of the 3-4 left to go or not, I could hand back the papers to those whose papers I've finished grading and ask the others to stop by on Thursday to pick up their papers. That way everyone would get their papers back sooner. To make up for the inconvenience to those who wouldn't get their papers back tomorrow, I'd give them a 2-day extension on project #2.
Think about it. There's a decent chance I'll be presenting you with this option tomorrow.
On Monday we'll continue our discussion of reserve design principles. I hope to finish with an example from Massachusetts: the Massachusetts BioMap project. There aren't additional readings associated with this part of the reserve design lecutre, but you may want to take a look at the BioMap web site. You can find a link on the page for Monday's lecture.
I'm grading papers this weekend. I'll try to have them finished by Monday, but I don't think I'm going to make it.
If you've been wondering where the readings and notes for today's lecture have been, you can stop wondering. They're available now. Sorry for the delay. The last couple of weeks have been crazy.
You may remember from our discussion of the Endangered Species Act that non-U.S. animals and plants can be protected under the Act. An article that I read this morning describes a change in how some of the regulations implementing those provisions will be implemented.
Section 10(1)(A) of the Endangered Species Act allows the Fish and Wildlife Service to grant exemptions to the law's ban on endangered species imports in order to "enhance the propagation or survival of the affected species." Invoking this section, the administration proposes to permit the importation of wildlife from countries with effective conservation programs.The administration claims that importation of live members of endangered species or importation of their parts can produce income that will enhance conservation of the species in their native range.
I'm skeptical. The article summarizes my feelings well:
In the end, what the change does is allow Fish and Wildlife Service officials to gamble with the future of foreign wildlife stocks. It substitutes a speculative weighing of incentives for a bright line rule.
You can read the Federal Register notice of the proposed change in regulations on the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's web site. If you'd like to submit comments on the policy, they are due by this Friday, October 17.
The notes and readings for tomorrow's lecture (13 October) are finally available. Sorry for getting them posted so late, but it's been a busy weekend.
Don't forget that Project #1 is due by 3:30pm tomorrow.
Notes for the lecture on Monday, 13 October will not be posted until some time this weekend. It may be late Sunday afternoon. If you were looking for them before then, I apologize for the inconvenience. I may have links to suggested readings before then, but don't count on it.
On a different note, I'll be handing out the assignment for Project #2 on the 27th of October, not the 22nd as originally announced.
The McCann et al. paper on the importance of weak interactions wasn't among the suggested readings for either Monday's lecture or today's, and so far as I can tell, all of the links to readings are working. If you have trouble with one, please e-mail me and let me know which one it is.
The General Accounting Office just released a report on implementation of the U.S. Endangered Species Act (http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-03-803). According to an article in Science, the GAO concludes "that decisions governing which species should be protected and how much habitat should be set aside for their recovery 'are generally based on the best available science.'" It also finds "that the process of designating the critical habitat that endangered populations need to recover has become dominated by litigation, sapping much of the agency's ESA funding."
The issue of Conservation Biology that just arrived on my desk also has several articles that caught my eye:
Don't forget that the second Teale Lecture will be presented Thursday at 4:00pm in the Konover Auditorium of the Dodd Center. The speaker will be Diana Wall, and her title is
Belowground diversity of hot and cold deserts
Dr. Wall is Director of the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University.
Project #1 is now available. There are links to HTML and PDF versions of the project assignment on the lecture page for 6 October. Papers are due no later than 3:30 next Monday, 13 October.
You'll find the associated readings both in the reading list for 6 October reading list and in the master reading list. In both cases you'll recognize them by the
The lecture notes and readings for Monday's lecture are now available. Expect the first project assignment to appear on the site some time this weekend, probably late Sunday afternoon.
I forgot to mention a paper on metapopulation dynamics that appeared in Science a couple of weeks ago: Metapopulation persistence with age-dependent disturbance or succession, by Alan Hastings. Hastings points out that persisting populations in a metapopulation can give a false sense of security, because they may persist in spite of low colonization rates. Once again the article points out that it's easy to underestimate the risks populations face and hard to overestimate them.
The following announcement may be of interest:
On Thursday, October 9, 2003, at 12:00pm (noon) in the Mansfield Room of the Nathaniel Hale Inn at the University of Connecticut, the public is invited to a two-hour luncheon and telecast by the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP) to participate in the first annual National Campus Sustainability Day. The telecast will address what sustainability is and its importance for a secure and civil society; the critical role of higher education in creating a sustainable world; strategies for making sustainability a foundation of higher education learning and practice; and our role in creating the transformative changes needed in higher education. Panelists include:
Ray Anderson, Chairman and CEO of Interface Flooring Systems, Inc., Atlanta, Georgia
Julian Keniry, Director of Educational Programs for the National Wildlife Federation, Washington, D.C.
Freda Pagani, Director of the Office of Sustainability for the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C.
David Orr, Chair and Professor of Environmental Studies for Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio
John Porretto, Executive V.P. for Administrative and Finance at the University of
Texas Health Science Center, Houston, Texas
This event will provide an opportunity for university faculty, staff, and students along with local residents and experts to discuss current levels of sustainability among American colleges and universities, as well as to address what can be done here at the University of Connecticut and other local universities to minimize ecological damage while prospering economically. Admission: Free. For information, call (860) 486-0636.
Kent Wells mentioned the kakapo in yesterday's lecture. Bill Sutherland described how officials of the New Zealand Department of Conservation used ideas derived from sex-ratio theory to increase the frequency of females among newly produced offspring (15 out of 24) in Nature about a year ago. It's a "News and Views" piece, so it's short and easy to read. Take a look. (You get to see a color photograph of a kakapo if you do.)
Jeffrey Pietka, a Student Conservation Association (SCA) representative will be
available to talk with students interested in paid internship opportunities on
Thursday, October 9th from 1-2pm in TLS 171B (Bamford Room).
SCA has exciting internship opportunities available throughout the year in
numerous disciplines within the Sciences and the Humanities, including:
Wilderness Habitat Restoration, Historical Interpretation, Marine Ecology, GIS,
Environmental Education and Fire Management. For more information, visit the
SCA's website at Posted by Kent at 4:26 PM | TrackBack
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