Service Description

Join us for lively conversation, drinks, and hors d’oeuvres as we celebrate another year as guardians of the Bull Run Mountains Region. We are fortunate to have William McShea, a wildlife ecologist for the Smithsonian’s Conservation Biology Institute at Front Royal, Virginia, USA, as our keynote speaker, presenting "How the Ecology of Deer Impacts Our Ability to Manage Virginia Forests.” Dr. Bill McShea is a wildlife ecologist for the Smithsonian’s Conservation Biology Institute at Front Royal, Virginia, USA. He received his education at Bucknell University (B.S.), University of New Hampshire (M.S.), and State University of New York at Binghamton (PhD). He has worked at the Front Royal facility since 1986. He is past co-chair and current member of the IUCN Deer Specialist Group, which is responsible for setting endangerment levels for deer species worldwide, and a member of both the Bear Specialist and Bovid Specialist Groups. He has edited 5 volumes on wildlife management (deer, oak forests, Asian wildlife, and giant pandas), co-authored a book on deer ecology, and coauthored over 200 scientific publications. He runs several forest-related projects in Virginia and a grassland ecology project in Montana. When not in the USA, Bill currently works in Southeast Asia, Borneo, and China. Bill’s research focuses on the management and diversity of wildlife populations and much of this work involves mammal surveys using camera traps. He is a founding member of eMammal and Wildlife Insights, which facilitate citizen science projects using camera traps and displays wildlife data and images through the websites. A present focus is Snapshot USA which collects camera trap data from all 50 states to map the distributions of mammals.