A Framework for Sustaining Yellowstone and America’s Other Wildlands
By Andrew Hansen
April 6, 2017
12:15 p.m.
Join us for our first Draper Natural History Museum Lunchtime Expedition lecture of 2017. Professor Dr. Andrew Hansen from the Ecology Department at Montana State University-Bozeman presents A Framework for Sustaining Yellowstone and America’s Other Wildlands.
Large tracks of intact nature are vital for supporting native species and ecosystem services. Such wildlands are being lost globally despite international efforts to protect them. This talk suggests that “greater wildland ecosystems” or GWEs can better be sustained in the United States by incorporating them into national biodiversity policy and consistently applying collaborative conservation planning approaches at the spatial scales that are most relevant to wildland ecosystems and to the people living in and around them. This framework focuses on public and private collaborative conservation within GWEs.
The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem serves as a case study that illustrates the need for and challenges of implementing this framework, and reveals that even one of the world’s best known ecosystems is undergoing a significant loss of ecological integrity. However, the resources currently exist to achieve much better results. Hansen recommends regional and national forums that promote implementation of the GWE conservation framework.
About our speaker
Dr. Andrew Hansen discusses “A Framework for Sustaining Yellowstone and America’s Other Wildlands” on April 6.
Hansen is also Director of the Landscape Biodiversity Lab at Montana State. He teaches macroecology to undergraduates and landscape ecology to graduate students. His research focuses on interactions among biodiversity, climate change, and land use, with an emphasis on large landscape management and protected areas. Hansen received his PhD in ecology at the University of Tennessee and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. While on the faculty of Oregon State University, he studied ecological approaches to forestry.
Hansen’s current research focus is on sustaining wildland ecosystems under climate and land use change, with a focus on the United States and eight countries in the humid tropics. This work uses a combination of remote sensing, spatial analysis, computer simulation and field studies, and has been funded primarily by NASA, U.S. Department of the Interior, Environmental Protection Agency, U.S Department of Agriculture, conservation organizations, and the timber industry. Hansen is on the science leadership teams for the North Central Climate Science Center and the Montana Institute of Ecosystems. He is co-editor of the recent book, Climate Change in Wildlands: Pioneering Approaches to Science and Management.
Draper Natural History Museum Lunchtime Expeditions are supported in part by Sage Creek Ranch.
Join us the first Thursday of each month April through December for a Lunchtime Expedition. These free lectures, supported in part by Sage Creek Ranch, explore a variety of natural history subjects and issues. Lectures take place in our Coe Auditorium at 12:15 p.m. and are free and open to the public.
On May 4, join us for an all-day symposium, Recent Advances at High Elevation
Upcoming Lunchtime Expeditions:
- May 4: taking the place of our May lecture is the symposium Recent Advances at High Elevation, 9 a.m.–2:30 p.m.
- June 1: Kenneth P. Cannon with Rolling Thunder: 10,000 Years of Bison in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem
- July 6: Jesse Boulerice with Past, Present, and Future for Black-footed Ferrets in Wyoming
- August 3: Todd Wilkinson with An Afternoon with Grizzly 399
- September 7: Larry Todd with High Elevations, Old Sites, and New Perspectives on Human Paleoecology in Wyoming’s Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem
- October 5: Corinna Riginos with Oh Deer! The Problem of Roads as Barriers to Deer Migrations and Movements in Wyoming
- November 2: Craig Lee with The Archaeology of Alpine Snow and Ice in the Mid-latitude Mountains of the Greater Yellowstone and Beyond
- December 7: Dan Thompson with Resurgence of the Carnivore: Realities in the World of Large Carnivore Conservation and Management
