CELS 2

ESA Centennial Ecology Lecture Series: Joshua Tewksbury

Lecture Title: Together or not at all: The collective power of ecology and natural History in the Anthropocene Joshua grew up on farms in Vermont and California, got sucked into natural history as an undergraduate, where he wrote and published a field guide to butterflies in central Arizona, and didn't realize ecology was a theoretical discipline until he hit graduate school. Ever since he found out there was a formal discipline that sought to explain the diversity of the world, Josh has been working as a ecologist, a naturalist, and a conservation scientist, continually caught between the desire to save and savor the natural world. He is the founding director of the Luc Hoffmann Institute, a boundary science organization at WWF that brings together biophysical science, social science, and policy and practice experts to focus on solutions to multidisciplinary conservation challenges, and his research has wandered across a wide range of basic and applied questions in ecology and conservation. Over the past 15 years, Josh's work includes studies of why chilies are hot, assessments of the physiological impacts of climate change on insects across latitude, and explorations of the importance of fragmentation and connectivity to plant and animal communities. He has been a professor at the University of Washington for a dozen years, and for the past 5 years, he has served as the Doug and Maggie Walker Professor of Natural History, where he has worked on building the scaffolding for a re-emergence of natural history, both within and beyond the Ecological Society of America.