Last set of notes

I just posted what should be the last set of notes for the course. You'll find them on the page for Monday's lecture. Please try to take a look at them before Monday. The concepts are pretty abstract and philosophical, but I hope that you'll come prepared with questions and challenges. We'll learn a lot more that way.

On a related note, I plan to finish lecturing around 11:30 on Monday to leave plenty of time for the course evaluation. Remember to bring #2 pencils to fill in the bubble sheet.

I expect to finish grading the last few papers for Project #2 tonight. If you haven't received a copy of your graded paper by tomorrow morning, please e-mail me. There's a decent chance I'll forget to send someone a copy of their paper. In fact, it's already happened once.

Project #2

By now most of you should have received graded copies of Project #2. I still have a few more to grade, and I hope to have them finished before class tomorrow morning. If you're one of the “lucky” ones who doesn't have their paper back yet and I don't get your paper back to you before class, I'll be in touch early tomorrow afternoon to let you know where things stand. I apologize to those of you affected by the delay, but I thought it better to get papers back to as many people as possible tonight. All of you have already been waiting long enough.

Notes on valuing biodiversity

I've posted notes on valuing biodiversity. We'll start talking about how economists have tried to place a value on biodiversity on Monday after we finish our discussion of decision making under uncertainty. Speaking of which, I have received only five responses to my request for utility functions. I can illustrate the principles if I only have those five, but it will be more fun if I get a larger number of responses. Please get them to me as soon as you can.

If you've forgotten what the request is: Just click here.

Utility function

Since we're going to spend a little more time on utility functions and statistical decision theory on the Monday after Thanksgiving, I'd like to try something a little more sophisticated than what I showed in class today. Here's teh scenario.

Imagine you have $1000 in your pocket. You're going to spend that imaginary $1000 by allocating it among five possible states of the world:

pE = 1.00
pE = 0.75
pE = 0.50
pE = 0.25
pE = 0.00

(pE is the probability of Sumatran rhino extinction before 2100.) There are two rules you have to follow in allocating your money among the alternatives:

1. You must allocate all of your money.
2. You must allocate more money to outcomes with a lower probability of extinction (and less money to those with a higher probability of extinction.

When you've decided on your allocations, please e-mail them to me. Be sure that I can easily tell which dollar amount goes with which pE. I'll combine the separate allocations into a single utility function (by summing across the individual allocations), and we'll use the new utility function in our analysis after Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Notes posted

Notes for tomorrow's lecture are now posted. I'll try to post the notes for the three (yes three) lectures that are left after Thanksgiving before we reconvene the Monday before Thanksgiving. I will also return graded Project #2 papers sometime during the week of Thanksgiving break.

Case study posted – finally

I made it – barely. It's now 5:51 and I've just posted some notes and discussion questions for tomorrow's case study. Sorry this is getting up so late, but things have been crazy for me lately. See you at 10:30 tomorrow.

Kareiva and Marvier

I'm still working on notes for tomorrow's case study discussion. (I hope to have them posted by 6:00pm.) In the meantime, I thought I'd let you know that I found a PDF version of the Kareiva & Marvier paper. It's easier to read than the version that I knew about earlier, so I've modified the link to point to the PDF. Let me know if you run into any trouble with it.

Case study – setting global conservation priorities

I decided to shift the focus of the case study discussion for Monday from reserve design to the problem of setting global conservation priorities. I anticipate that Project #3 will focus on analysing either a particular reserve design or the methods used by a particular conservation organization (probably The Nature Conservancy) in designing reserves or reserve systems. You'll find the readings associated with the case study on the page for Monday's lecture. I'll get an outline and some suggested questions for discussion posted on Sunday – I hope by early afternoon.

By the way, I clearly will not have papers graded by Monday, and I'm not likely to have them graded by Wednesday. I'll return them via e-mail early in Thanksgiving week.

An article from Nature

Today's issue of Nature has a news feature that looks quite interesting, Conservation priorities: What to let go. I haven't had a chance to read it yet,¹, but here's the tagline:

Not all species can be saved from extinction. Emma Marris talks to conservation biologists about prioritization and triage.

If you're still looking for a final project idea, this article might give you some ideas. If you're not, you may still find it quite interesting.

¹Look at the time this was posted!

Final project

As promised (threatened?), I've posted more information about the final project on the course web page. You can find it by scrolling to the bottom of the Overview page, or here's the direct link:

http://darwin.eeb.uconn.edu/eeb310/overview.html#project

Reserve design

It's been crazy lately, but I finally have the notes on reserve design posted. There is currently another case study discussion planned for Monday. I'll do my best to have readings posted by Friday and a brief introduction and suggested topics for discussion by early Sunday afternoon. Sorry for the delays.

By the way, if you haven't received an acknowledgment that I received your Project #2 paper, let me know, and I'll check to make sure that I received it.

Notes for Monday are posted

I have another half hour or forty-five minutes of things I'd like to say about species invasions. Once we've finished that, I want to step back a bit and talk about global biodiversity patterns.