Christopher X J. Jensen
Associate Professor, Pratt Institute

EnviroAtlas is now live, publicly available

Posted 30 May 2014 / 0

For the past couple of years I have been playing around with a really cool tool called EnviroAtlas, a project of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This past semester I created two classroom activities that use EnviroAtlas, implementing them for the first time in my Ecology for Architects course. The EnviroAtlas tool was in beta-testing Read More

A Minor Post, Biodiversity Loss, Biomes, Bogs & Wetlands, Citizen Science, Computer Science, Conservation Biology, Data Limitation, Deserts, Ecosystem Services, Education, Educational Software and Apps, Environmental Justice, Eutrophication, Grasslands, Habitat Destruction, Invasive Species, Long Term Ecological Research, Macroecology, Pollution, Ponds & Lakes, Population Pressure, Public Policy, Quantitative Analysis, Rivers & Streams, Sustainability, Teaching, Teaching Tools, Temperate Forest, Temperate Rainforest, Urban Ecology, Water Supply, Web

Understanding the cascading effect of carnivore loss… before we lose all the carnivores

Posted 25 Jan 2014 / 0

NPR Morning Edition “When Big Carnivores Go Down, Even Vegetarians Take The Hit” Science “Status and Ecological Effects of the World’s Largest Carnivores” Both of these articles are great for introducing the idea of trophic cascades as well as how trophic inefficiency implies that large predators require large ranges containing abundant prey.

A Minor Post, Articles, Biodiversity Loss, Community Ecology, Conservation Biology, Data Limitation, Ecological Modeling, Keystone Species, Long Term Ecological Research, Predation, Radio & Podcasts

Understanding biome-level response to climate change

Posted 19 May 2010 / 0

This month’s Scientific American contains a great article (“Arctic Plants Feel the Heat“) on how scientists are documenting climate change in the Arctic. Focusing on the two dominant biomes of this region, the tundra and the taiga, author Matthew Sturm explains how three sources of data are allowing us to see recent changes linked to Read More

A Major Post, Articles, Climate Change, Data Limitation, Long Term Ecological Research, MSCI-270, Ecology, Phenotypic Plasticity, Taiga (Boreal Forest), Tundra

Human Adaptation and Happiness

Posted 18 May 2009 / 0

I just finished reading a fascinating article in The Atlantic entitled “What Makes Us Happy?”. Although I am not all that well-read or at all trained in human behavioral science, I am increasingly interested by it, and this article by Joshua Wolf Shenk does an amazing job covering a lot of ground. In the past Read More

A Major Post, Adaptation, Altruism, Data Limitation, Ecology, Evolutionary Psychology, Happiness, Human Evolution, Long Term Ecological Research, Psychological Adaptation