Carl Walters

Carl Walters (born 1944) is an American-born Canadian biologist known for his work involving fisheries stock assessments, the adaptive management concept, and ecosystem modeling. His most recent work focuses on how to adjust human behaviors in environments that are full of uncertainty. In 2019, Dr. Walters became a Member of the Order of British Columbia.

Education

Carl Walters graduated from Bakersfield College with an A.A in 1963 and continued to Humboldt State College to graduate with a B.S. in 1965. After Walters graduated, he went to Colorado State University to study the "Distribution and production of midges in an alpine lake" under the advisement of Dr. Robert E. Vincent. After obtaining his M.S. in 1967, Walters stayed on with R.E. Vincent to get his doctorate on the "Effects of fish introduction on invertebrate fauna of an alpine lake" and graduated in 1969. Walters did not go on for a postdoctoral position; instead he almost immediately started working at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. One of his goals has been, and continues to be, to try to bridge the gap between fisheries management, government, and fishing industries in order to provide accurate information to use in successfully and actively managing fisheries. His work in modeling population dynamics and active adaptive management has made Walters a valuable member of the scientific community.

Contributions

Foraging Arena Theory Other modeling equations like the Beverton-Holt model and the "hockey stick" model by Barrowman and Myers (2000) try to explain density dependent effects of juvenile fish populations using processes like recruitment and the number of eggs produced. Fisheries biologists and population ecologists have used the Beverton-Holt model since the 1960s to describe the "stock-recruitment" relationship. Walters encourages other scientists, managers, and policy makers to embrace the uncertainty in experiments and decisions and to develop ecosystem models based on the uncertainties in order to make multiple hypotheses instead of just one hypothesis. These hesitations arise from large monetary costs for the experiments as well as the monitoring of the experiments, lack of an individual willing to take on the daunting task of organizing the experiments, the limitations of models to perfectly represent an ecosystem, and the conflicting ecological values between different interest groups. (1998) Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation (2001–2004) Mote Eminent Scholar - Florida State University and Mote Marine Laboratory (2001–2002) Murray A. Newman Award for Marine Conservation (Vancouver Aquarium) (2005) Volvo Environment Prize (2006) Timothy R. Parsons Medal (2007) University of British Columbia, Killam Teaching Prize (2009) Canadian Aquatic Resources Section, American Fisheries Society, Legend of Canadian Fisheries Science and management (2014) International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) Prix d'Excellence (2014) Member of the Order of British Columbia (2019) UBC Emeritus Award for Excellence in Innovative and Creative Endeavours (2026)