SPEAKER: George Roderick Professor and Department Chair Environmental Science, Policy, and Management UC Berkeley DATE: Wednesday, April 11, 2018 TIME: 4:00-5:30pm PLACE: 126 Barrows DESCRIPTION: The goal of the Island Digital Ecosystem Avatars (IDEA) Project is to build functioning digital simulations, ‘avatars’, of model islands, as a model to scale up to larger organizational units, with the outcome that communities and countries manage their ecosystem wellness and avoiding the social consequences of ecological collapse. The IDEA Consortium is an open science initiative in systems ecology. Islands are scientifically tractable, and we begin with one of the best known: Moorea, French Polynesia (Moorea IDEA) to develop the place-based socio-ecological data science infrastructure and associated computational platform needed to support scenario-based planning. BIO: Professor Roderick received his PhD at Berkeley, and held positions at Universities of Maryland, College Park, and Hawaii, Manoa, before returning to ESPM at Berkeley, where he is chair and William Muriece Hoskins Professor. Growing up on an island off the coast of Maine, he has never left his attachment to island systems, which continue to be the focus of much of his work and collaborations with his wife, Professor Rosemary Gillespie. He has served the State Department, NSF, US EPA, and USDA, including chairing the first Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum on Alien Invasive Species involving 17 economies in Beijing in 2005.