About The Department

The Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Science has a mission to provide and apply scientific knowledge and understanding of inter-relationships among people, living organisms and environments through outreach in teaching, research and community service. Faculty and students address how human communities and individuals interact with their environments and how collectively we can best manage the resources and ecological services provided by our shared environment for a sustainable future.

Our research is explicitly interdisciplinary as we investigate multiple human values, resource needs and impacts on the environment, and how to achieve an optimum tradeoff in a changing world. Our teaching is also interdisciplinary and integrative, exploring the nexus of fundamental scientific knowledge and management applications through three undergraduate majors and active participation in four interdepartmental graduate majors.

Being part of a land-grant university in northern Nevada, our immediate focus is on the ecology, resources and environment of the Intermountain West or Great Basin, from the peaks and forests of the Sierra Nevada and Lake Tahoe in the west, to the Rocky Mountains in the east, and encompassing the vast complex of playa, salt desert, sagebrush and pinyon-juniper woodlands that typifies the Great Basin. This region has long traditions of ranching and mining in its rural areas that are key foci of our work.

However, there is also rapid urban development around Las Vegas and Reno that presents new and increasing demands for land, water and power, new and increasing problems with waste disposal and pollutants, new environment values and needs from city people with a passion to get out into wilderness on the weekend, and thus new challenges in management of the wildland-urban interface. In response to this social revolution, we also examine the impacts of Nevada 's growing cities on their hinterlands.

In addition to our local work, our department is increasingly aware of the global connectedness of environments, such as through global climate change, intercontinental movements of pollutants by air and water, long-distance seasonal migrations of birds and mammals, and the intense international network of human travel, trade and cultural exchange. Thus our research and teaching interests reach out of the West to locations as far-flung as Alaska , Mexico , Brazil , Mongolia , Uzbekistan and Antarctica .

Details of our faculty and lab groups, research projects, collaboration with Federal and State government agencies and industry partners, curricula and courses, and outreach programs are available from the links on the left side of this page. Browse them and if you have further questions, feel free to contact the main office of the department (see the Contacts link) or any individual faculty professor (see the Directory link).

We hope that you use our site to learn more about the unique, dynamic field of Natural Resource and Environmental Science and some of the high-quality contributions to scientific community and professional education that have earned the UNR Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Science recognition throughout the world.