If managed and used sustainably, the oceans could provide people with very high-quality sources of protein and other important natural resources. Coupled with the population growth and the region's heavy reliance on their natural resources, Sub-Saharan Africa represents both an urgent challenge and a huge opportunity for using this wealth from the oceans as to reduce hunger, alleviate poverty and secure good livelihoods. I will discuss my work in an NGO on ocean health in general and my current role developing a strategy for expanded ocean conservation engagement in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Voluntary markets transacted over $66 million USD of forest carbon offsets internationally in 2016 and over 99% of those offset projects were audited to a standard, primarily the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS). This talk will present key characteristics of the 70 validated and verified forest carbon projects employing the VCS version 3.0 in use from late 2011 through present. This talk will also discuss two separate aspects of the audit process-impact and thoroughness-to assess the effectiveness of the credibility-building audit process, which can consume up to one-third of offset revenue. We found that VCS needs to improve the effectiveness of the auditing process for avoided deforestation projects in particular.

Yolanda Chen: Origin and Management of Insect Pests in Agroecosystems by University of Vermont

Dr. Hurley will be presenting key results from several research projects exploring urban and agricultural runoff and ecological landscape design for stormwater treatment. Water quality improvements and volume attenuation for a dozen built bioretention systems will be described. Her presentation will also include landscape visualizations for green stormwater infrastructure design alternatives that can be adopted by private landowners and/or within the public right of way.

Identifying the appropriate approaches to influence human behavior and decisions is a major challenge for conservation. Shelia will share how Conservation International is using economics and behavioral sciences to systematically identify barriers to conservation and the appropriate approaches to overcome them. She will draw on examples related to corporate sustainability, coastal resilience, urban conservation, and sustainable agriculture.

Leif will discuss the effects of below ground mycorrhizal mutualisms on crop pollination by wild bees. - Crop production depends on the ecosystem service of pollination. Bee pollinators are attracted to flowers by presence of nectar and pollen, but availability of such floral rewards could be affected by plant associations with other organisms. Using highbush blueberry, he will show that mutualistic mycorrhizal fungi inhabiting plant roots alter floral traits in ways that increase pollinator visitation, potentially resulting in increased crop yield.

Insu is a post-doctoral research associate in Taylor Ricketts?s lab at UVM. Insu is broadly interested in how landscape structure and composition influence biodiversity, organism dispersal and ecosystem services. He received his Ph.D. in environmental/city planning from the Graduate School of Environmental Studies at Seoul National University and previously conducted post-doctoral research at Purdue University.

Poverty is one of the most important casual factors of lower population health. In this talk, Sam will discuss our understanding of how inequality structures disease risk and how biases in surveillance impair our ability to intervene in the most at risk communities.

Cultural ecosystem services (and more generally, socio-cultural values related to ecosystems) are increasingly recognized as a critical component of conservation assessment and practice. This class of services is, however, notoriously thorny and difficult to characterize. Researchers continue to innovate ways to characterize these difficult-to-measure phenomena; the first half of this talk will summarize those current efforts and potential next steps. The second half of the talk will focus on a potential complication with CES that is seldom discussed in the ecosystem services field: that many cultural ecosystem services are dynamic (i.e., that peoples' perceptions of them develop and change). I will suggest that changes in, and development of, Cultural Ecosystem Services depend on personal experiences, exposure, and the learning often intertwined with those life experiences. I will present results of a literature review investigating how published outcomes of environmental education intersect and interact with Cultural Ecosystem Services.

This talk will discuss the role of behavioral economics in food and exercise choices. We'll discuss different incentive schemes, the power of default options, and brainstorm on why certain techniques we think will have positive effects like calorie labeling aren't as straightforward.

It's not uncommon to look to ant societies for solutions to problems that human societies face. After all, the ants figured out agricultural, tool use, medicine, and countless other innovations long before human societies did (or even existed).But can studying how ant societies respond to climate change tell us anything about how human societies might respond to climate change?

My students, collaborators, and I work at the intersection of community ecology, ecosystem ecology, and macroecology, with an explicit focus on the consequences of global change. Specific areas of inquiry focus on the effects of climate change in mountain ecosystems around the world, the cascading consequences of sodium limitation in terrestrial ecosystems, and many aspects of the ecology of ants.