Watershed Moments - Newsletter Article


   

 

UVM SEGS Lab at Center of new $7.4 Million USDA Grant

   
A recently announced $7.4 million, five-year grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture will place the University of Vermont at the forefront of a national effort to reduce the impact of catastrophic disease outbreaks within the U.S. livestock industry.

One of the key components of the proposal is the UVM Social-Ecological Gaming and Simulation Laboratory (SEGS Lab), established with funding from the National Science Foundation’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).

The SEGS lab takes an experimental gaming approach for bringing the dynamics of human decision-making into models of ecosystem-level problems, enabling researchers to determine how farmers and producers would react to disease or pest outbreaks without exposing animals to new infectious threats.