2019 Annual Meeting

66th Annual Meeting of the Western Section of The Wildlife Society

Fellow wildlifers, please join us at the 2019 annual meeting of our section to be held at the Tenaya Lodge at Yosemite in Fish Camp, California.   We have a wonderful slate of activities, networking events, and professional paper sessions scheduled that we are sure you will not want to miss.

Our theme and plenary session topic this year is “Death And Taxas: Extinction and Speciation During the Anthropocene.”  We find ourselves faced with death, the plight of declining to extinct taxa, the discovery of new taxa, and the rediscovery of taxa thought to be extinct. Extirpation, recovery, extinction, and rewilding: one thing they have in common is humans, one thing that differentiates them is the passage of time. To reach extinction, to resort to rewilding, means we’ve waited too long. In the Anthropocene, time is money, and the costs to rebuild a species from genes and spare parts can be exponentially greater than those necessary to manage a species in decline.  These are sobering thoughts in trying times, but the challenges are not insurmountable. Even as science marches forward, there is still time to remember the past so that we are not condemned to repeat it. These are the questions we’ll be exploring, using case studies from the past – the elephant seal, California condor, Xerces blue butterfly – to inform crises in the present – Sierra Nevada red fox, Lange’s metalmark butterfly, mountain yellow-legged frog.

TWS meetings provide many opportunities!    Present your research, learn from others, learn about the society, and network.  We hope you are able to join us to establish future collaborations, generate new ideas, and reinvigorate your enthusiasm for wildlife conservation as well as make new friends and colleagues.  We hope you will share your time with us and help us build a stronger Western Section of TWS.

Matthew Bettelheim, TWS-WS President-Elect
2019 TWS-WS Annual Meeting Chair
Certified Wildlife Biologist, Science Writer, Natural Historian, AECOM Employee