WILLIAM R. AND LENORE MOTE
EMINENT SCHOLAR CHAIR

Walters received his B.S. degree from Humboldt State College and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Colorado State University.  He has worked at the University of British Columbia since 1969.

Dr. Walters is a specialist in fisheries stock assessment, adaptive management, and ecosystem modeling.  He uses mathematical modeling and computer simulation techniques to improve understanding of the dynamics of exploited marine ecosystems and to find more effective methods of managing them in the face of natural variability and high uncertainty.  He advocates cooperative arrangements between governments and fishing industries to provide improved information for stock assessment and management through methods such as industry-based surveys.  His main research work is on the theory of harvesting in natural-resource management, with a primary interest in the basic problem of how to behave adaptively in the face of extreme uncertainty.  He is one of the main developers of the ecosystem simulation program known as Ecosim, which is being used to test ideas about organization of trophic interactions in marine systems and the implications of these interactions for sustainable harvesting theory.

He has written over 150 articles and several books, including Adaptive Management of Renewable Resources (MacMillan) and Quantitative Fisheries Stock Assessment and Management (with Ray Hilborn, Chapman & Hall).  He also serves on the editorial boards of a number of journals, including the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, Conservation Ecology, and Ecosystems.

Dr. Walters is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1998) and a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation (2001).

Dr. Walters' web site: http://www.fisheries.ubc.ca/members/cwalters