Urban Wildlife Ecology & Management: An International Symposium on Urban Wildlife & the Environment

July 1, 2009

This conference was held at the University of Massachusetts in beautiful and quaint Amerst, MA between June 21 and June 24. The last conference of this type to be sponsored by the Urban Wildlife Working Group of The Wildlife Society was held in 1999 in Tucson, Arizona.

David Burg attended the conference on Monday, June 21 and then returned on Wednesday, June 24 with two volunteers, Caesar Rahman and Paige Reidy. Much of the focus on Wednesday was on urban herpetology (a topic that Caesar is extremely interested in- he is doing his own turtle and terrapin research in both Jamaica Bay and Alley Pond Park in Queens!)

The conference brought together many professionals from around the world specializing in the areas of urban planning, landscape design, public policy, and ecology. With an issue as complex as urban wildlife management it is important to pursue an interdisciplinary approach, employing many different solutions to these multi-faceted problems. The planery featured talks by Dr. Richard T. T. Forman of Harvard University, Dr. James Miller of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Michael Feller, Deputy Chief of the City of New York Parks and Recreation Natural Resources Group.

By Paige Reidy (WildMetro Summer Intern)