Darwin Day Lecture

Come join us and listen to Scott Gardner, PhD, School of Biological Sciences UNL talk about:

Collecting and Identifying All the Species on Earth. Progress since Darwin and Wallace.

Refreshments will be available.

For Flyer and REASON website (http://www.Reason.ws/reason_darwin_day.aspx)

Globally, nature is under fire. We are furiously digging, cutting, burning, building, and converting our naturally complex ecosystems into simple monoculture fields. As the human population continues to increase, more pressure is placed on the remaining tracts of uncut forests, prairies, and grasslands. We are in a race against time to collect, identify, archive and make these data available to people interested in conservation of biodiversity for the future. I call myself a biodiversitist, someone who studies and describes biodiversity with the goal of understanding it before it is gone. My focus is mostly on mammals and their parasites, but we have been working to understand the complex ecology, biodiversity, and biogeography (where and how organisms came to be where we find them now) of many kinds of animals (and their parasites). In my talk, I will summarize with images and power point slides, the work that the Manter Laboratory is leading in our quest to understand the interconnections of nature and perhaps provide a view that few people get to experience.