Lang, Railsback and Associates
Natural resources research and management
Arcata, California | Phone and fax: 707 822 0453 | info@LangRailsback.com
Who we are
Margaret Lang is an environmental engineer specializing in environmental fluid mechanics, hydraulic modeling, fish passage through hydraulic structures, and hydrology. She is a full professor in the Environmental Resources Engineering Department at Humboldt State University.
Steve Railsback is an environmental engineer and ecologist specializing in modeling ecological systems, individual-based ecological modeling, and assessment of instream flow needs for river fish and ecosystems. He is an adjunct professor in the Mathematics Department and Environmental Systems Graduate program at Humboldt State University and previously was on the research staff at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Our associates include talented scientists and professionals with whom we contract as needed for projects. Associates have included software developers, environmental engineers, ecologists, decision scientists, and field technicians.
What we do
Our mission at LRA is to provide quality basic and applied environmental research with high quality, focus, and productivity. Unlike many environmental consultants, we are experienced and skilled at research: developing and testing hypotheses and technologies to answer basic questions and solve management problems. Unlike many university researchers, we can often dedicate substantial time and resources to our clients’ specific needs.
Much of our work is in river management and freshwater fish, but we have also worked on a variety of other problems such as forestry effects on owls, river management effects on amphibians and birds, effects of regulations on fishing fleets, and land use effects on birds and the pest control services they provide.
Our clients have included American Bird Conservancy, Argonne National Laboratory, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the Electric Power Research Institute, the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station, the U.S. Geological Survey’s Forest & Rangeland Ecosystem Science Center, the Ocean Conservancy, Pacific Gas & Electric, Save the Redwoods League, and a variety of universities and consulting firms in the U.S. and abroad.
How to contact us
You may email us at: info@LangRailsback.com
More information
Please use the following links for more information and announcements about our work.
- Margaret Lang at Humboldt State University
- The individual-based modeling page at Humboldt State, where much of our ecological modeling work is described and there is a list of Steve Railsback’s publications
- The home of inSTREAM, the trout population model for river management that we develop and maintain
- The web site for Agent-based and Individual-based Modeling: A Practical Introduction, the modeling textbook by Steve Railsback and Volker Grimm
- The Princeton University Press page for Modeling Populations of Adaptive Individuals, the book on modeling adaptive tradeoff behaviors in individual-based models, by Steve Railsback and Bret Harvey
Swarm virtual machine and MinGW
Click here for our page of information on installing and using Swarm. It provides a VirtualBox virtual Linux machine that has Swarm installed, and a version of MinGW and MSys that may or may not allow you to compile Swarm code in Windows.