March 31, 2021, via Zoom Insect pollinators are becoming visible to societies. The value of insect behaviors that pollinate human crops, animal feed, and wildlife forage is entering public consciousness, media, and culture. In light of well-documented declines in managed honey bees, people are becoming aware of declines of the world’s other 20,000+ native bees—the invisible workers whose impact on food security and economics remain unknown. And people now like bees. The world’s governments are catching up with this popular interest and the science of insect conservation. Insect pollinator decline is inherently a human issue, driven by a history of land-use trends, changes in technologies, and cultural perceptions that unwittingly cause and perpetuate declines. Whereas all environmental policy is about changing human behaviors. Conservation of insect pollinators requires integrating social and ecological understandings to reconfigure human behaviors across societies’ sectors. In this talk, we take a tour of conservation policy efforts. We examine how the science of insect declines is being translated into nascent international agreements, national, US state, and municipal efforts as well as the conservation practices of home gardeners. The speaker: Damon Hall is an assistant professor jointly appointed in the School of Natural Resources and Biomedical, Biological & Chemical Engineering. He is the Certificate Coordinator for the Undergraduate Certificate in Sustainability and Director of the Center for Watershed Management and Water Quality at MU. He received his BS in Agriculture and MA in from Purdue University. At Purdue, he was apiary manager of Dr. Hunt’s Honeybee Genetics Lab. He completed a PhD in Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences at Texas A&M University as a Boone & Crockett Conservation Policy Fellow. After postdoctoral at the University of Maine’s Sustainability Solutions Initiative, he was an assistant professor in the Center for Sustainability and Department of Biology at Saint Louis University before joining MU. Damon was hired as a part of the “Pillars of Pursuit” cluster hire under Sustainability inFEWSed (Food, Energy, Water, Smart Cities) in 2018. His research examines interactions between social and ecological systems where science, policy, and culture meet. His work involves engaging stakeholders in environmental policy, sustainability planning, systems modeling, life cycle assessment, and hydrological modeling. At Mizzou, he heads the Sustainability Science Lab, which includes projects in water resources planning, urban pollinator conservation, and communicating social-ecological systems models. Hall has received grants from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the National Science Foundation, and the Missouri Department of Conservation. Dr. Hall’s paper, “The city as a refuge for insect pollinators,” has received awards from the Society for Conservation Biology including highest Altmetric score, most cited, and top 20-most downloaded. He has received a teaching honor from Saint Louis University and a partnership award from the Missouri Conservation Heritage Foundation. His research has been covered by over 130 news and magazine sources since 2018. Professor Hall is a member of the International Society for Sustainability Science, the International Association for Society and Natural Resources, and the Ecological Society of America.

Be the first to comment