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The San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research (SDZICR) in San Diego, California, is a research organization that works to generate, use, and share information for the conservation of wildlife and their habitats. In 1975, Kurt Benirschke, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) who studied human and animal reproduction, and Charles Bieler, the director of the San Diego Zoo, collaborated to form the Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species (CRES). In 2009, the San Diego Zoo announced the creation of SDZICR, which expanded and replaced CRES, to provide central organization and management of scientific programs at the San Diego Zoo. By 2004, Allison Alberts was the director of research and for more than a decade oversaw the SDZICR's many research initiatives, including the collection and storage of genetic and reproductive information of rare and endangered animal and plant species.
Extreme heat, a widespread environmental hazard, is experienced disproportionately by historically disinvested and marginalized communities in Tempe. The City of Tempe has thus identified the importance of preparing the City’s youth to move into positions of power within the community to prepare for a future of rising temperatures and climate uncertainty, specifically as it relates to intergenerational community resilience. The City’s long-term Cool Kids, Cool Places, Cool Futures project plans to accelerate the City’s existing climate action by activating and empowering local youth as change agents in the co-creation of cooler, more equitable, and healthier futures. This MSUS project aims to develop strategies for the youth and the city that work together to advocate for and implement youth-designed and neighborhood-focused climate action projects in the Escalante and Victory Acres neighborhoods. The envisioned solution for this project is the creation of a dual strategy to connect youths’ visions for the future of Tempe with the City’s capacity (resources, funding, etc.) to adequately implement them. To complete this, the MSUS team facilitated a visioning workshop for local youth at McClintock High School to brainstorm potential climate action projects. As a result of this workshop, an action guide was then developed by the MSUS team with strategies to help jumpstart these youth-designed projects, highlighting the necessary social and physical assets and infrastructures needed for the projects to succeed. In turn, the City received a report outlining how they can best support the youth in the realization of these action projects. Both of these strategy guides will be used in parallel to begin the implementation of the climate action projects in the Fall of 2022.
Still, the NPS remains committed to the preservation of our natural and cultural heritage. Yet the practice of that promise is evolving, slowly and iteratively, but detectably. Through explorations of legal and scholarly literature, as well as interviews across the government, non-profit, and academic sectors, I’ve tracked the evolution of preservation in parks. How is preservation shifting to address socio-ecological change? How has preservation evolved before? How should the NPS preserve parks moving forward?
The practice of preservation has come to rely on science, including partnerships with academic researchers, as well as inventory and monitoring programs. That shift has in part been guided by goals that have also become more informed by science, like ecological integrity. While some interviewees see science as a solution to the NPS’s challenges, others wonder how applying science can get “gnarly,” due to uncertainty, lack of clear policies, and the diversity of parks and resources. “Gnarly” questions stem in part from the complexity of the NPS as a socio-ecological system, as well as from disputed, normative concepts that underpin the broader philosophy of preservation, including naturalness. What’s natural in the context of pervasive anthropogenic change? Further, I describe how parks hold deep, sometimes conflicting, cultural and symbolic significance for their local and historical communities and for our nation. Understanding and considering those values is part of the gnarly task park managers face in their mission to preserve parks. I explain why this type of conceptual and values-based uncertainty cannot be reduced through science.
Green infrastructure serves as a critical no-regret strategy to address climate change mitigation and adaptation in climate action plans. Climate justice refers to the distribution of climate change-induced environmental hazards (e.g., increased frequency and intensity of floods) among socially vulnerable groups. Yet no index has addressed both climate justice and green infrastructure planning jointly in the USA. This paper proposes a spatial climate justice and green infrastructure assessment framework to understand social-ecological vulnerability under the impacts of climate change. The Climate Justice Index ranks places based on their exposure to climate change-induced flooding, and water contamination aggravated by floods, through hydrological modelling, GIS spatial analysis and statistical methodologies. The Green Infrastructure Index ranks access to biophysical adaptive capacity for climate change. A case study for the Huron River watershed in Michigan, USA, illustrates that climate justice hotspots are concentrated in large cities; yet these communities have the least access to green infrastructure. This study demonstrates the value of using GIS to assess the spatial distribution of climate justice in green infrastructure planning and thereby to prioritize infrastructure investment while addressing equity in climate change adaptation.
Hundreds of thousands of archaeological investigations in the United States conducted over the last several decades have documented a large portion of the recovered archaeological record in the United States. However, if we are to use this enormous corpus to achieve richer understandings of the past, it is essential that both CRM and academic archaeologists change how they manage their digital documents and data over the course of a project and how this information is preserved for future use. We explore the nature and scope of the problem and describe how it can be addressed. In particular, we argue that project workflows must ensure that the documents and data are fully documented and deposited in a publicly accessible, digital repository where they can be discovered, accessed, and reused to enable new insights and build cumulative knowledge.
Cientos de miles de investigaciones arqueológicas en los Estados Unidos realizado en las últimas décadas han documentado una gran parte del registro arqueológico recuperado en los Estados Unidos. Sin embargo, si vamos a utilizar este enorme corpus para lograr entendimientos más ricos del pasado, es esencial que CRM y los arqueólogos académicos cambian cómo administran sus documentos digitales y los datos en el transcurso de un proyecto y cómo se conserva esta información para uso en el futuro. Exploramos la naturaleza y el alcance del problema y describimos cómo se pueden abordarse. En particular, sostenemos que los flujos de trabajo de proyecto deben asegurarse que los documentos y datos son totalmente documentados y depositados en un repositorio digital de acceso público, donde puede ser descubiertos, acceder y reutilizados para activar nuevos conocimientos y construir conocimiento acumulativo.