Pete August has been involved in climate change and environmental management issues in Rhode Island for several decades, so he was the natural choice when Gov. Gina Raimondo sought a chairman for the newly created Rhode Island Executive Climate Change Science and Technical Advisory Board. A former director of the URI Coastal Institute, he founded the University’s Environmental Data Center 30 years ago to apply cutting-edge mapping technologies to address land conservation and natural resource management issues.

Professor August started his career in ecology as a grad student studying rodents and bats in Venezuela. “Small mammal trapping can be slow in the tropics with 100 traps yielding only a capture or two each day. But when the fig trees had ripe fruits, the night sky would become alive with bats,” he said. “I put up my first mist net and caught hundreds of individuals. There were always 30 bats of a dozen or so species in my net. Studying bat ecology was a lot more fruitful data-wise than rodents and marsupials.”

That research led him to URI in 1981, where he has been a fixture in the state’s community of biologists and ecologists. He helped establish the Rhode Island Natural History Survey and has been a long-time member of the advisory boards of the Rhode Island chapter of the Nature Conservancy, the Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Association, the Richmond Land Trust and the Napatree Point Conservation Area.

Although the theme of much of this work has been using computer technology to help conserve biodiversity, to many of his students and colleagues he will always be URI’s batman.