David R. Foster, Director of the Harvard Forest, to Give 8th Annual Geddes W. Simpson Distinguished Lecture

Contact: Judy Round (207) 581-5100

ORONO, Me. – David R. Foster, director of the Harvard Forest, will give the Univerity of Maine’s 2009 Geddes W. Simpson Distinguished Lecture. The lecture will be held on the UMaine’s Maine Day, Wednesday, April 29 at 3 p.m. in the McIntire Room of Buchanan Alumni House. The topic of Foster’s lecture will be “Reading and Conserving New England. Using History to Interpret and Manage Nature.”

Foster is an ecologist and author of Thoreau’s Country—Journey Through a Transformed Landscape, New England Forests Through Time, Forests in Time—The Environmental Consequences of 1000 years of Change in New England, and Wildland and Woodlands: A Vision for the Forests of Massachusetts. He has been a Harvard biology professor since1983 and is director of the Harvard Forest, Harvard University’s 3500-acre ecological laboratory and classroom in central Massachusetts. Foster is the principal investigator for the Harvard Forest Long Term Ecological Research Program, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, and involving more than100 scientists and students investigating the dynamics of New England landscape as a consequence of climate change, human activity and natural disturbance.

Foster has a Ph.D. in ecology from the University of Minnesota and has conducted studies in the boreal forests of Labrador, Sweden and Norway and the forests of Puerto Rico, the Yucatan, and Patagonia in addition to his primary research on landscape dynamics in New England. At Harvard University, Foster teaches courses on forest ecology and environmental change and directs the graduate program in forest biology.

The family of Geddes Wilson Simpson established the Geddes W. Simpson Lecture Series Fund at the University of Maine Foundation in 2001. Simpson was a well-respected University of Maine faculty member for 55 years, chair of the Entomology Department and the editor at the Maine Agricultural and Forest Experiment Station. He retired from UMaine in 1974.

The public is invited.