Feedback from law colleagues

R package build

2021/03/08

Last Wednesday, March 3, 2021, I had a chance to present some of my research at the Haub School of Law’s Faculty Development Workshop. I sent a draft of a manuscript I’m co-writing with one of my grad students (the student is first author) regarding using species distribution models in local management decisions a few days ahead of time, then gave a 20 minute presentation on the topic. After my presentation, we had a Q&A / discussion. This manuscript is the culmination of a NYS DEC Hudson Estuary Program grant I received several years ago to study the potential role of road culverts in connecting amphibian and reptile habitat. (I’m planning on doing more work with culverts in the future, but this will wrap up this first project. I submitted the final project report to the state about 1.5 years ago.) The main jist of the paper is that we developed SDMs for 16 focal species in our region, used those SDMs as estimates of habitat suitability for these species, then identified locations of culverts that overlap those distributions and cross under roads. Our management guidance is to focus on culverts that overlap with several species distributions and cross under roads.

I was keen to present this work to my colleagues at Pace’s Law School, because I thought they would have some thoughts and insights on how to move from an academic article to application of the findings. And I wasn’t disappointed! Several great ideas and suggestions came up during the discussion. Here are some of them, in no particular order:

Overall, I thought we had a great conversation, my law colleagues gave me some great ideas. And perhaps more importantly, they gave me a bit of inspiration to take the next steps of bringing this work back to the stake holders here in our region. I’ll put it on the to-do list.