Thursday, October 30, 12:00 noon – 1:00 pm – Biodiversity and Land Conservation at the Massachusetts Natural Heritage & Endangered Species Program
The overall goal of the Natural Heritage & Endangered Species Program (NHESP), part of the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, is the protection of the state’s wide range of native biological diversity, particularly the vertebrate and invertebrate animals and native plants that are officially listed as rare in Massachusetts. The talk by Patricia Swain, Ph.D., Natural Community Ecologist on Thursday, October 30, at noon, will focus on conservation through identifying, tracking, managing, and regulating rare species and identifying and mapping NHESP priority natural communities. Land use history, climate change, and other influences on native biodiversity will be part of the discussion.
Patricia Swain’s job as natural community ecologist for NHESP means working state wide with the rarest and most imperiled natural communities in Massachusetts and the best examples of the more common types. Patricia is currently revising The Classification of Natural Communities of Massachusetts that was first produced in 2001; since then they have been adding new types and adjusting the original descriptions so that a clean version (with illustrations and a key) seems like a useful product. Patricia has been the Natural Community Ecologist for MassWildlife’s Natural Heritage & Endangered Species Program since 1987. Before that she was a stay at home mom and part time academic, teaching occasional ecology and biology classes at the local university and technical college. She graduated from Tufts with a Biology major, and obtained her MS and PhD degrees in Ecology from the University of Minnesota.
Lunch & Learn lectures take place every Thursday from 12:00-1:00pm at the Lincoln Filene Center, Rabb Room on the Medford Campus during the academic year. The Tufts Institute of the Environment generously sponsors lunch. If you are interested in participating in the Lunch & Learn program as a guest lecturer/participant, contact environmentalstudies@tufts.edu. You can’t make it to the talk? No problem! Watch it live here from your computer or smart phone. Photo by Patricia Swain.
