Wildlife Seminar

WLF 2121

 

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Course Description

 

This is a seminar course, which means several different topics related to wildlife conservation and management will be discussed.  My role is either to lead the discussions myself or facilitate the discussions with guest speakers. 

 

We begin the course by introducing you to some of the equipment and techniques used by wildlife biologists.  The intent of the exercises is not to train you to be proficient in the use of the equipment, at least not yet.  The objective is to wet your appetite for field-oriented wildlife work.  That is why you want a wildlife degree, isn’t it?

 

After learning to shoot dart guns and operating telemetry equipment, we then move to discussing the concept of wildlife conservation and how it relates to wildlife management and preservation.  This is not simply an issue of semantics.  More and more people entering the field of wildlife management are preservationists at heart.  We will discuss the philosophical differences between conservation and preservation and how these perspectives impact our views on wildlife management and how wildlife management is conducted in North America.

 

In an introductory wildlife course it is useful to discuss the broad range of job descriptions and career opportunities available to wildlife biologists.  These discussions form the core of this course.  To assist us, several professional wildlife biologists representing various wildlife agencies and organizations will meet with us to discuss what they do for their respective agency or organization and the day-to-day challenges they face in doing their jobs.  You will find the presentations interesting and enlightening.  You will also find the scope of wildlife conservation and management in North America to exceed your expectations. 

Hunting, and the role it historically played and continues to play in wildlife conservation and management, is the next topic we will deal with.  It is fundamentally true that hunters and anglers, and the huge amount of revenue they generate annually, are the primary reasons we enjoy the incredible diversity and abundance of fish and wildlife resources in North America.  Our hunting heritage and the North American Model for Wildlife Conservation will be discussed in detail.

We will wrap up the course discussing global climate change.  Wildlife species are closely adapted to their environments and readily respond to climate variation.  The global climate change now underway has extensive potential to affect wildlife throughout North America, either directly or indirectly through responses to changing habitat conditions.  Ignoring climate change is likely to increasingly result in failure to achieve wildlife management objectives.  Wildlife managers must become knowledgeable about climate change, ways to cope with it, and ways to take advantage of it.  We will begin your pursuit of this knowledge in this course.

 

Lecture/Discussion Schedule

 Downloadable documents (pdf version) are underlined in blue.