Welcome Message from Chair Dr. Blatner
Welcome to the Internet Domain for the Department of Natural Resource Sciences (NRS) at Washington State University.
As you will note in browsing this site, our department is the primary unit at WSU focusing on understanding and managing forest, shrub, and steppe ecosystems, and the array of natural resources, resource values and socioeconomic factors associated with such ecosystems. We have foundational philosophic commitments in two broad areas:
- Diversity, both in terms of variety of natural resource disciplines, subjects and perspectives featured in our programs, and in terms of the cultural and human breadth we strive to impart, respect and serve amongst staff, students and constituencies; and
- Integration, in terms of emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of natural resource science and the necessity of interrelating science with the socio economic, cultural, political and ethical context within which resource management is practiced.
Our department features and integrates the fields of natural resource sciences, wildlife ecology, and related subject areas as facilitated by departmental faculty in disciplines of economics, social science and watershed science, plus other faculty in related fields of environmental, agricultural and biophysical sciences in other units at WSU. You will find that our department provides programs within each of the tripartite, land-grant missions of WSU: undergraduate and graduate education; research; and extended education and service to professional and public sectors of society. We feel, and hope you will come to agree, that we offer programs of high caliber that serve society’s needs in a comprehensive and (in many ways) unique fashion.
Although natural resource sciences have been featured at WSU for nearly a century, our department is relatively “young” as presently structured following reconfiguration in 1988, and we certainly continue to evolve. This home page is even younger; we appreciate your interest in it and us – and we encourage you to directly contact the department for things we have yet to incorporate.
Best Regards,
Keith A. Blatner
Professor and Chair
