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Conservation Speaker Series

Sponsored by Boeing

You are invited to attend a series of lectures on a variety of conservation topics on the second Tuesday of each month this fall at the Schlafly Bottleworks in Maplewood, at 7260 Southwest Avenue.

 
Within one hour you can understand the big picture of botany from a conservation perspective. Learn the basics of some general principles that will equip you to understand plant function and ecosystem basics anywhere in the world. 

Doug Ladd is the director of conservation science for The Nature Conservancy in Missouri.  He has been involved with conservation planning and natural area assessment, management, restoration and research for more than 30 years, with particular emphasis on vegetation, ecological restoration and fire ecology. Doug is a research associate at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis and the Morton Arboretum in Chicago. He has written two plant field guides: North Woods Wildflowers and Tallgrass Prairie Wildflowers, and is a co-author of Discover Natural Missouri and Distribution of Illinois Vascular Plants. 

Space is limited to the first 100 participants. 

No reserved seats.

Lectures will take place in the Crown Room where you may order food and drinks from the bar. Come early or stay late for dinner!Boeing Corp.

 Schlafly Bottleworks

 

 

Dr. Sparks will present on the world’s great rivers.  What makes a river “great”?  Certainly the rivers where civilization began, such as the Nile, the Indus, the Tigris, and the Euphrates, qualify as “great” in human terms given the link between them and the rise of agriculture, writing, complex societies, and monumental architecture.  These rivers were characterized by seasonal floods which inundated floodplains, thereby renewing the fertility of the soil and enabling people to practice agriculture and stay in one place for hundreds to thousands of years.  Elsewhere, people had to move on when the fertility of the soil was exhausted.  Although early civilizations capitalized on predictable seasonal floods by harvesting natural resources and later practicing a flood-adapted form of agriculture, they were also subject to occasional great floods and droughts that disrupted food production and destroyed lives and property.

Today, the situation at first appears to be quite different.  Virtually all the large rivers in the tropic and temperate parts of the world are regulated by dams and many of the floodplains and deltas are leveed and developed, not just for dryland agriculture, but also for industrial and municipal uses.  Despite these technological achievements, severe problems have developed, including: recent damaging floods around the world (including two events in 2008 in the Upper Mississippi River Basin); expansion of hypoxic zones at river mouths; subsidence and erosion of river deltas; and decline or loss of many species, including commercially valuable fishes and charismatic species, such as the Yangtze river dolphin.   

The Nature Conservancy, the National Great Rivers Research and Education Center, and others are working jointly to develop new, collaborative approaches to sustain ecological services of great rivers and help people live safely and well with these fascinating and dynamic ecosystems.
 

Dr. Richard Sparks is the Director of Research for the National Great Rivers Research and Education Center (NGRREC) in Alton, Illinois.  NGRREC is a partnership of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Lewis and Clark Community College in Godfrey, IL; the Illinois Natural History Survey; and several other institutions in both Illinois and Missouri, including The Nature Conservancy (TNC).  He and his wife, Ruth, are avid field biologists and long-term members of TNC, where both have frequently volunteered their services.  Dr. Sparks serves on the Board of Trustees of the Illinois Chapter and chairs the chapter’s Science Advisory Committee.  He has advised TNC’s programs on several rivers, including the Illinois, Missouri, Mississippi, and Atchafalaya, as well as the Parana-Paraguay in Brazil and the Yangtze in China.

 

Space is limited to the first 100 participants.  No reserved seats.  Lectures will take place in the Crown Room the second Tuesday evening of the month in September, October and November.  Next lecture is:  Tuesday, November 10, 2009.

For more information call: (314) 968-1105.

 

Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 7:00 p.m.
Karen Eckert presents "Dinosaurs Among Us:  Saving the Last Sea Turtles"


Sea turtles have plied the world's oceans for more than 100 million years, but declines at the hands of man have been swift in recent decades.  Dr. Eckert has spent her professional career studying these gentle, ancient creatures, and she will share with us some good news about how people and sea turtles are learning to live together in the Caribbean Sea.  Her success stories are an inspiration for conservation efforts everywhere!

Dr. Karen L. Eckert received her Bachelor's Degree in Biology with Highest Honors from Principia College in 1980, and later a Certificate in Global Policy Studies (1987) and a doctorate in Zoology (1988) from the University of Georgia.  Her Certificate thesis was entitled “Multi-lateral Conservation - A Critique of Past and Present Efforts in the Wider Caribbean Region”; her Dissertation was entitled “Nesting Biology of the Leatherback Sea Turtle, Dermochelys coriacea."  She has been active for nearly three decades in the fields of sea turtle research and international conservation policy.  She is currently executive director of the Wider Caribbean Sea Turtle Conservation Network (WIDECAST) and a research scientist on the faculty of Duke University, North Carolina.  She is based at the university’s Nicholas School Marine Laboratory.


Space is limited to the first 100 participants.  No reserved seats. 

 

For more information, call 314-968-1105.