Natural Resource Management seminars

Ocean-wide movement and mixing between tuna stocks make population monitoring difficult and increase uncertainty in sustainable-harvest estimates. Matthew Lauretta presents genetic close-kin mark-recapture methods evaluated using western Atlantic bluefin tuna collected during fisheries monitoring and research surveys. Larvae sampled on western spawning grounds provide genetic links to mature fish at spawning time. Adults later migrate to Northwest Atlantic feeding grounds, where they mix with other stocks. Comparing larval genotypes with adults caught by fisheries identifies parent–offspring relationships, allowing estimation of capture probabilities and the total abundance and biomass of the spawning population with relatively high precision. Online via Vimeo with advance attendee registration, including an option for attendees outside NOAA. Live captions are available and a recording is planned.

Cary Institute lecture with environmental historian Stephen Pyne (professor emeritus, Arizona State University) in conversation with Cary forest ecologist Winslow Hansen, on humanity's evolving relationship with fire, why destructive megafires have increased, the role of climate and land-use decisions, and pathways toward restoring ecological fire balance.

David Cooper assesses progress towards the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s 2030 targets and 2050 goals. He explains why biodiversity matters for human security and wellbeing, drawing on recent assessments of conditions in the UK and globally. The lecture considers prospects for recovery and argues that conservation efforts need complementary changes across economic sectors and society to address biodiversity loss and support people and nature together.

Agriculture and urban development threaten soil processes that sustain biodiversity, nutrient cycling, water regulation and climate resilience. The seminar examines how ecosystem-based interventions can restore soils, and why soil health must itself be built into the design of those interventions. Examples from the SOLU-BIOD research programme in France and abroad connect ecological restoration with food and water security. The discussion also considers practical barriers to adoption and the public policies needed to support implementation.

This panel examines the growing need to account for nature and biodiversity in private-sector decisions. Researchers and business practitioners consider the challenges and opportunities involved, in the context of the IPBES assessment of biodiversity and business. The discussion brings perspectives from biodiversity science, management, financial disclosure, industrial leadership and water infrastructure to the relationship between ecosystems and commercial activity.

This panel examines how biodiversity science can inform decisions in business, finance and government. It assesses what is known about biodiversity status and trends in marine and terrestrial systems, which dimensions matter for decisions, and how to navigate financial-disclosure frameworks, science-based targets, national indicators and biodiversity credits. The discussion considers emerging methods including genomics, AI-based monitoring, functional traits, multiple knowledge systems and global indices. It asks how these approaches can support ecological recovery without reinforcing extractive measurement or governance, and how metrics can respect Indigenous rights, knowledge and decision-making. The panel also recognises that better measurement is only one component of changing business impacts on nature.

Partha Dasgupta considers how economic progress should be measured during an ecological crisis. Drawing on his work on natural capital, he examines an approach to economics that assigns value to nature alongside other assets. The discussion asks how changing the way economies value the natural world could change the way they protect it. Dasgupta connects economic measurement with environmental sustainability and the challenge of recognising nature’s contribution to human well-being.

Conservation has changed from early resource-management initiatives into several sometimes competing approaches to protecting nature. This seminar surveys their practical and philosophical foundations in Western conservation and asks how each treats introduced species. It then examines the circumstances and methods for controlling or eradicating invasive organisms.

Research and management of biological invasions involve value judgments as well as empirical findings. This seminar examines where those values enter scientific concepts, management questions and decisions about public investment. It considers how researchers and practitioners can make those commitments explicit, justify their choices and discuss invasive-species policy transparently.

Economic activity both spreads introduced species and suffers their consequences, while some introductions can also generate financial benefits. This seminar examines that complicated relationship and why invasions receive uneven attention from policymakers. It considers how economic concepts and decision tools adapted to biodiversity conservation can clarify costs, incentives and management choices.

Professor Amy Dickman established is the joint CEO of Lion Landscapes, which works to help conserve wildlife in some of the most important biodiversity areas of Africa. These areas include some of the most important areas in the world for big cats, but also have an extremely high level of lion killing, as lions and other carnivores impose high costs on poverty-stricken local people. Amy and her team are working with local communities to reduce carnivore attacks, providing villagers with real benefits from carnivore presence, engaging warriors in conservation and training the next generation of local conservation leaders. It has been a challenging endeavour, given the remote location and secretive and hostile nature of the tribe responsible for most lion-killing. In her talk, Amy will discuss the significance of this project, the difficulties of working in an area where witchcraft and mythology abound, and the conservation successes that are already emerging from this important work.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has recently shown great promise as an approach to networked system control. Arguably, one of the most difficult and important tasks for which large scale networked system control is applicable is common-pool resource (CPR) management. Crucial CPRs include arable land, fresh water, wetlands, wildlife, fish stock, forests and the atmosphere, of which proper management is related to some of society’s greatest challenges such as food security, inequality and climate change. This talk will consist of three parts. In the first, we will briefly look at climate change and how it poses a significant threat to life on our planet. In the second, we will consider the potential of multi-agent systems for climate change mitigation and adaptation. And finally, in the third, we will discuss recent research from InstaDeep into better understanding the behaviour of networked MARL systems used for CPR management. More specifically, we will see how the tools from empirical game-theoretic analysis may be harnessed to analyse the differences in networked MARL systems. The results give new insights into the consequences associated with certain design choices and provide an additional dimension of comparison between systems beyond efficiency, robustness, scalability and mean control performance.