The School of Natural Resources kicks off its 2012 fall seminar series Wednesday, Sept. 5 at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s East Campus Hardin Hall with Andrew Tyre’s lecture about making decisions in the face of uncertainty.
The Geography General Seminar Series also opens this week, with Juan Paolo Ramirez’s talk, “Professional Experiences as a Geographer in the U.S.” And the Applied Ecology Series will hold its third seminar of the fall semester on Friday with Mehmet Can Vuran’s “Improving Telemetry Technology for Wildlife studies.”
Tyre’s lecture, “Beyond Adaptive Management: How Uncertainty Shapes Ecologists’ Contribution to Management,” will address when an adaptive management approach can help shape and make sound policy recommendations even when there are still too many unknowns.
“Not all forms of uncertainty are amenable to reduction by the application of the scientific method,” said Tyre, an associate professor of wildlife ecology and human dimensions at UNL. “Irreducible uncertainty is here to stay.”
Tyre’s seminar will be in the Hardin Hall auditorium, beginning at 3:30 p.m.
His current research focuses on using predictive “prototype” models of habitat and population dynamics to guide decisions about habitat management for threatened and endangered species. The prototypes are a collaborative effort between small groups of managers and stakeholders that incorporate their objectives into the modeling process. By involving the decision makers in the process of predicting the consequences of their decisions, they more readily accept recommendations that emerge from the process.
Ramirez, a geography lecturer at UNL, opens his seminar in Hardin Hall, room 228, at 2 p.m.
M. Can Vuran’s seminar on using technology for wildlife studies will be held in room 163 at 3 p.m. Can Vuran is a computer science and engineering professor at UNL.