School of Natural Resources Seminar: Ricky Berl

Abstract

Wildlife management in North America is built upon a strong scientific tradition from the biological and environmental sciences, using monitoring of populations and ecosystems to inform decision making and maintain the health and sustainability of these resources. However, influences from human activities and social systems are often primary determinants of wildlife distributions, abundances, and health, while still only rarely being considered directly as part of management decisions and interventions. Concurrently, management objectives and actions are driven by human relationships and interactions with the environment and the values that people hold toward wildlife, and are primarily concerned with providing benefits to people. To consider wildlife management as being situated within and contributing to an integrated social-ecological system opens up the potential for more sophisticated approaches to integrating insights from human dimensions and the conservation social sciences. This talk will use examples from waterfowl harvest and chronic wasting disease to illustrate emerging avenues for applied social science methods to inform wildlife management.



Bio

Richard Berl (https://www.usgs.gov/staff-profiles/richard-berl) is a Research Social Scientist with the USGS National Wildlife Health Center. He brings a background in evolutionary theory and culture change to his work illuminating the dynamic influences of human cultural values and behavior on natural resource management and decision making. In particular, he assists state, federal, and Tribal agencies with the social and behavioral dimensions of conservation problems, framed within an integrative understanding of human, wildlife, and environmental health.