Science Club Seminar Speakers 19th July 2016

Biosciences Science Club Series - Summer term 2016

19 July 2016 - 1pm - Zoology Museum (Wallace 129)

The Changing Landscape for Wildlife: Space Use, Biological Scales, and Predictive Ecology

Dr. Garrett Street

(Mississippi State University, USA)

photo by Eleonor Yushtyina

This month Dr. Garrett Street, from the Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Aquaculture at Mississippi State University (USA), will be visiting our University and has kindly agreed to give a talk on his current research. Garrett is a wildlife ecologist broadly interested in animal movements, landscape ecology, spatial modelling and wildlife and ecosystem management.


Abstract
As landscapes change due to human land use and climate change, effective management and conservation requires attention to ecological phenomena occurring at multiple biological and spatiotemporal scales. Consideration of scale-dependency has produced a shift toward predictive ecology based on bottom-up and top-down phenomena. 

In this talk, I discuss the efficacy and utility of bottom-up approaches to predicting the distribution and abundance of wildlife across levels of biological organization from individuals to populations to biomes and global abundance. I emphasize both classical and modern statistical techniques for spatially explicit population estimation and discuss the role of wildlife not only as reactants to, but active contributors toward the function and stability of local ecosystems and the global biosphere.

Hope to see many of you - everyone is welcome!