I am very excited to announce the 2016 winner of the Distinguished IB Student Speaker Award, Danielle Ethier. Tomorrow, Danielle, a senior PhD student working with Dr. Tom Nudds, will tell us about her multidisciplinary work on "Factors affecting the abundance of a declining migratory songbird". As Danielle eloquently pointed out:
Conservation biologists are faced with the task of making management decisions in highly complex environmental systems, where imperfect knowledge makes it difficult to predict whether our decisions (i.e., policies) will adequately protect species and their habitats. These same decisions are also increasingly under the scrutiny of stakeholders, who may have financial, cultural, or other interests in the way our natural resources are managed. Stakeholder perceptions of policy decisions can either be catalysts or impediments to natural resource management, and must therefore be understood if successful conservation strategies are to be developed and implemented. This is a major challenge facing conservation biologists today, and forms the basis for my research: to design effective conservation policies for wildlife in Canada in light of considerable ecological uncertainty, while ensuring that the economic and cultural interests of stakeholders are maintained.
Over the years, Danielle has been working hard to build an impressive CV that includes several first author publications and that spans an impressive breadth of not only taxonomy but also of application; indeed, Danielle's work is of broad scientific interest, especially as a proof of concept for facilitating knowledge and technology transfer. I encourage you to come our last seminar of the season, and celebrate the unique work of one of our excellent graduate students.
Danielle will be joining her graduate student peers for lunch in the 2nd floor lounge at 12:30pm, and delivering her talk at 3:30pm in SSC 2315.
_from Dr. Amy Newman