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[PAST EVENT] Center for Geospatial Analysis/AidData Geospatial Lecture Series: Dr. Eric Sanderson to speak
November 13, 2015
3pm - 4pm
On September 12, 1609, Henry Hudson sailed past a long thin wooded island called Mannahatta that would someday be known as Manhattan. Through the Mannahatta Project, Dr. Eric Sanderson and colleagues rediscovered the lost ecology and wildlife of Mannahatta on a block by block basis. Their research not only demonstrates how ecosystems are constructed in nature, and the extent to which the environment has been transformed in the last 400 some years, but also how ecosystem understanding can inform and inspire urban sustainability today. Since its public debut in 2009, the Mannahatta Project has extended in two directions: out, across the rest of New York City, through the Welikia Project, and into the future, through a public, free and open, webtool called Visionmaker. Visionmaker.nyc enables anyone to see the ecosystems of the city in the past, to see the ecosystems of today, and to share visions of ecosystems of the future in New York City, tied to measures of environmental performance, lifestyle choice, and climate change. Eric W. Sanderson is a Senior Conservation Ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), and the author of Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City (Abrams, 2009). His most recent book, Terra Nova, is about the prospect for an American landscape beyond oil, cars and suburbs. He continues the Welikia Project, on the historical ecology of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, and Mannahatta 2409, an on-line forum to help the public envision climate-resilient designs for Manhattan. He is an expert in species and landscape conservation planning, including in cities, with a particular interest in geographic and historic contexts for restoration and conservation. Previously he helped create the human footprint map of anthropogenic impact globally, the landscape species approach to conservation, and range-wide priority-setting for wide-ranging wildlife species. Sanderson holds a Ph.D. in ecology, with emphasis in ecosystem and landscape ecology, from the University of California, Davis. He works out of WCS headquarters at the Bronx Zoo.
Contact
Dan Runfola, drunfola@aiddata.org, or [[rarose01, Robert Rose]]