George Wright Society 2015 Proceedings Now Online

Last year (March 29-April 3, 2015) the George Wright Society met in Oakland, California, my home. It was great. I walked 20 minutes downtown and saw many people I've known from various projects regarding climate change and public open space lands presenting about their research. The proceedings are now available for download.

Get free downloads of PDFs of some the papers and attendee reflections from the 2015 conference here.

The George Wright Society is -- for the uninitiated-- "a nonprofit association of researchers, managers, administrators, educators, and other professionals who work in, or on behalf of, parks, protected areas, and cultural/historic sites" (per Wikipedia's article). I did not realize until I looked it up after the conference that George Wright--George Melendez Wright-- was born in 1904 and died in a tragic car accident on the job at age 31 in 1936, and was (a) from San Francisco, (b) El Salvadoran-American, son of an immigrant, (c) like me a graduate from UC Berkeley, and (d) the first scientist employed by the U.S. National Park Service. A cool-sounding dude.

The 2015 conference held by the non-profit named after him was titled "Engagement, Education, and Expectations: The Future of Parks and Protected Areas." You can download a 203-page book, edited by Samantha Weber, with 49 papers and reflection statements from the conference.

Climate change was all over this conference. Here's the one scientific paper on the topic that made it to this collection:

Monitoring Landbirds in National Parks: Understanding Populations, Migratory Connectivity, and Climate Change (Albert et al.) - 7 pages

I saw a great presentation at GWS 2015 by Mark Schwartz (UC Davis) on assisted migration-- a cautious and rational approach to the quintessential hot-button topic in natural resource management. He was in the climate change "Focus Session" provocatively titled  "Climate Change Adaptation isn't for Sissies," moderated by NPS climate change luminary Leigh Welling, and featuring, besides Mark, other big names in the adaptation field UW's Josh Lawler and NPS climate scientist Patrick Gonzalez. Unfortunately, the research presented by them isn't in the free downloadable materials.

Read "A Framework for Debate of Assisted Migration in an Era of Climate Change" -- Mark Schwartz's influential 2007 article, authored with Jason McLachlan and Jessican Hellmann-- free on CAKEx.