Buffalo Bill Center of the West Lecture-Lunchtime Expedition
The Wyoming Natural Diversity Database: Tracking Wyoming’s Rarest Animals and Plants
By Gary Beauvais
Join us for our July Draper Natural History Museum Lunchtime Expedition lecture. Gary Beauvais, PhD, presents The Wyoming Natural Diversity Database. The talks in this series are free, and take place in the Buffalo Bill Center of the West’s Coe Auditorium.
Wyoming is famous for big, wild landscapes and diverse wildlife, including many species considered rare and deserving of conservation attention. Some of these rare species are well known: for example, black-footed ferret, grizzly bear, and other charismatic mammals in the Yellowstone area. But many are not well known: who has ever heard of stemless buckwheat, or the western glacier stonefly? The Wyoming Natural Diversity Database (WYNDD) at the University of Wyoming is a team of specialized biologists dedicated to developing comprehensive information on the rarest plants and animals in the state, and distributing that information to natural resource managers across the region to promote responsible resource development and conservation of our biological heritage. In this talk, Beauvais summarizes some of Wyoming’s most interesting—and obscure—species, discusses the characteristics that make them rare and of high conservation concern, and provides examples of WYNDD scientists working to increase our understanding of them.
About our speaker
Beauvais has served as Director of WYNDD for almost twenty years. He completed a BA in Biology at Colorado College in 1990, and a PhD in Zoology at the University of Wyoming in 1997. Originally trained as a vertebrate wildlife biologist with a strong interest in biogeography and conservation, his expertise has necessarily broadened to encompass aspects of botany and invertebrate ecology during his tenure at WYNDD. He currently serves as the Interim Director of the Biodiversity Institute at the University of Wyoming, a unit dedicated to education and public outreach on biodiversity issues in the Rocky Mountain West.
Draper Natural History Museum Lunchtime Expeditions are supported in part by Sage Creek Ranch and the Nancy-Carroll Draper Foundation.
Join us the first Thursday of each month February through December for a Lunchtime Expedition! These free lectures explore a variety of natural history subjects and issues. Lectures take place in our Coe Auditorium at 12:15 p.m. and are free and open to the public.
Upcoming Lunchtime Expeditions
- August 2: Larry Loendorf with Wildlife in Rock Art
- September 6: Holly Copeland with Wind Energy in Wyoming
- October 4: Zach Wallace with Golden Eagle Conservation in the Wyoming Basin Ecoregion
- November 1: Bonnie Lawrence-Smith with Golden Eagles in the Rock Art Record
- December 6: Bryan Bedrosian with Lead Poisoning in Wildlife
