Attendees at today's kickoff included:
City of Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, Buffalo Public Schools Interim Superintendent Donald Ogilvie, SUNY Trustee Dr. Eunice Lewin, University at Buffalo President Dr. Satish K. Tripathi, SUNY Buffalo State President Dr. Katherine Conway - Turner, Erie Community College President Jack Quinn, Regional Economic Development Council Co-Chair, businessman and developer Howard Zemsky, Staff
Scientist Mwita Phelps
of Life Technologies / Thermo Fisher Scientific, Director
of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Libraries Mary Jean Jakubowski, Dr. Norma J. Nowak, Director
of Science and Technology, UB's NYS Center
of Excellence
in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, as well as a
number of invited guests, including elected leaders, teachers and students.
«While urbanization has caused
cities to lose large
numbers of plants and animals, the good news is that
cities still retain endemic native species, which opens the door for new policies on regional and global biodiversity conservation,» said lead author and NCEAS working group member Myla F. J. Aronson, a research
scientist in the Department
of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources at Rutgers, The State University
of New Jersey.
But «we wondered what was the net consequence
of this big
number of groupers inside the park,» says Daniel Brumbaugh, senior conservation
scientist at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the American Museum
of Natural History
in New York
City.