THE BREN SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE AND MANAGEMENT
at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Presents

Hosted by Bren Professor Frank Davis

Abstract

The U.S. National Wildlife Refuge System (NWRS) is the largest system of protected areas in the world.  It encompasses over 93 million acres (37.6 M ha) and is composed of 547 refuges. Compared to other protected areas, the units are relatively small, typically embedded in a matrix of developed lands, and situated at low elevations on productive soils. Projected changes in precipitation, temperature, and sea-level rise associated with climate change will have NWRS-wide effects on species and their habitats.

Managing the “typical” challenges to the Refuge system requires accounting for the interaction of climate change with other stressors in the midst of substantial uncertainties about how stressors will interact and systems will respond. Climate change adds a known forcing trend in temperature and other environmental variables to all other stressors, which will likely result in complex non-linear challenges to species and ecological processes that will be exceptionally difficult to understand and mitigate. The historic vision of refuges as fixed islands of safe haven for species met existing needs at a time when the population of the United States was less than half its current size and construction of the first interstate highway was decades in the future. I will discuss the new tools, new partnerships, and new ways of thinking that will be required to maintain the integrity, diversity, and health of the refuges in the face of climate change and expanded human populations and economies.

Biography

From 1974 to 1984, Dr. J. Michael Scott served as a Research Biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at Mauna Loa Field Station, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. He continues to serve the agency today as a Senior Scientist with the Biological Resources Division of the U.S. Geological Survey. From 1984 to 1986, he was Project Leader of the Condor Research Center in Ventura, Calif., and in 1986 he was appointed to his current position as Leader of the Idaho Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit in Moscow, Idaho. In addition, he is Professor in the Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources at the University of Idaho, where he pioneered the Gap Analysis Program and served as GAP Program Leader from 1989-1997. 

Dr. Scott and his graduate students are currently conducting research on such diverse topics as the recovery of endangered species; the diversity, integrity, and health of wildlife populations in National Wildlife Refuges; and the effectiveness of current nature reserves in protecting the biodiversity of America.

Dr. Scott has authored or co-authored more than 200 journal articles, books, book chapters, and monographs on such wide-ranging topics as reserve identification, selection and design; tuna schooling behavior; endangered species recovery; estimating avian populations; and landscape approaches to conservation biology. Among his many books are The Endangered Species Act at 30: Renewing the Conservation Promise and The Endangered Species Act at Thirty: Conserving Biodiversity in Human Dominated Landscapes (2006), which he co-authored with Dale Goble and Bren Professor of Terrestrial Ecology Frank Davis.

Dr. Scott has received numerous awards recognizing his professional achievements. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Ornithologist's Union and has served as President of both the Cooper Ornithological Society and the Pacific Seabird Group.

__________________________________________________________________________________

To join the "bren-alerts" mailing list and receive regular announcements about Bren School news and events, or to manage your bren-alerts account, go to http://www.bren.ucsb.edu/services/computing/bren-alerts.htm

To see a complete list of currently scheduled Bren events, visit http://www.bren.ucsb.edu/news/all_events.htm

To have an event considered for distribution via bren-alerts, send e-mail to media@bren.ucsb.edu

For more information or for assistance in accommodating a disability, please contact BJ Danetra

To find out how to support the Bren School, please contact Jennifer Purcell Deacon