Nutritional Ecology Working Group Webinar Series

The Wildlife Society’s Nutritional Ecology Working Group initiated the first Nutritional Ecology Webinar Series held during the winter of 2020-2021.  Virtual webinars are hosted monthly at noon (Mountain Standard Time) on the first Wednesday of every month from Nov. 4, 2020 to Mar. 3, 2021.  The webinar series intends to illuminate a wide variety of contemporary nutritional ecology research across diverse taxa and ecosystems.

Nutrition is vitally important for every life process of every living creature — from optimizing growth and reproduction to decreasing susceptibility to disease, predation and death.  The science of nutritional ecology links food resources available to an animal with individual- and population-level performance, as well as to habitat- and landscape-level dynamics. With data collected on nutritional requirements, food availability and quality, foraging and life history strategies under different environmental conditions, and body mass and condition, managers can predict how changes in one will impact the other. This provides a clear path for managing food resources in a way that optimizes population performance, or alternatively, for managing animal populations to optimize the health of ecosystems. As global issues such as climate change, loss of habitat, and the spread of disease and parasites increasingly impact wildlife populations, the need for understanding the degree to which populations are limited by nutrition, and how we can best manage for nutrition, increases as well.

For a detailed schedule of presenters for the Nutritional Ecology Webinar Series, or to access videos of past webinars, please visit the Nutritional Ecology Working Group’s events webpage. The next webinar will take place on Feb. 3, where Morag Dick of Western University will discuss “sugar metabolism in hummingbirds and bats.”