Population Viability Analysis

Once per year, in cooperation with Dr. Steven Beissinger at UC Berkeley, I teach a course in Population Viability Analysis to natural resource managers at the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Conservation Training Center (NCTC) in West Virginia. PVA is an intensive one-week long course that provides managers with the tools and knowledge they need to both interpret and conduct PVAs that commonly guide management decisions regarding endangered species. The course covers a variety of topics including count-, matrix-, and occupancy-based population models, where students gain practical experience building and running PVA models in a series of guided computer exercises. An important theme of the course involves the careful consideration of model assumptions, model construction, and data required to conduct defensible viability assessments. This course is open to the public for a fee – check the NCTC site for updates on when the course will next be offered. Please see the syllabus from 2010 for details about the course.