Dr. Roland Kays to speak about conservation biology and camera trapping as part of Pratt’s Green Week celebration

I am proud to be collaborating with Photography Labs Manager and Assistant Professor Andy Todd to bring Dr. Roland Kays of North Carolina State University to Pratt Institute. Dr. Kays will make two appearances on the Brooklyn campus during the annual Green Week celebration:

• On Thursday, March 30th at 6 pm in ARC E-2, Dr. Kays will give a free public lecture entitled “Candid Creatures: How Camera Traps Reveal the Mysteries of Nature”. He will talk about how he uses camera traps to understand the behavior of wild animals and motivate public interest in species conservation.
• On Friday, March 31st at 2 pm in ARC E-6, Dr. Kays will conduct a workshop on how to use camera traps to answer scientific questions. This hands-on workshop is intended to give students an understanding of how to effectively employ various camera-trapping technologies. Space for this workshop is limited; you can contact me directly if you are interested in participating.

I am particularly excited for Dr. Kays’ visit because his work sits at an interface that is familiar to many of our students. He is working with photographic technologies, so he is operating in the realm of photography. He uses photography to answer scientific questions about the behavior and population sizes of animals, so obviously he spends a lot of time in the realm of science. But conservation biology isn’t just about science, it is also requires that we make tough decisions about what we want to conserve, which places his work firmly in the realm of values. Although Dr. Kays employs this combination of craft, science, and values in a different way than our students, he shares a common interest in the overlap between these three realms.

You can learn more about Dr. Kays’ work on animal tracking and camera trapping, and as the Director of the Biodiversity Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences on his website. You can read most of his numerous scientific publications on his ResearchGate page. His public lecture is based on his new book Candid Creatures.

You can download the poster advertising both events here.

Many thanks go to Pratt’s Academic Senate, which sponsored Dr. Kays’ visit.