Why did behaviorally modern humans and no other multicellular species in the history of the Earth gain the capacity to transform an entire planet? Biology alone cannot explain this – Homo sapiens is just another species in the genus Homo with a few distinctive traits- not including stone tools (common to all species in the genus) and fire (common to […]
The Human Landscapes Blog is back! Last year, I began an upgrade to WordPress – and got stuck- much harder than expected. More importantly, after starting to use twitter (@erleellis, @ecosynth, @globalyzer), I’d basically stopped blogging. Yet, I’d been feeling that something was missing – twitter isn’t a real replacement for blogging about the papers we publish and the work of others that […]
Roger M. Spanswick, Professor of Plant Biology, chair of my Ph.D. and undergraduate advisor, died on February 12, 2014 at the age of 74. Roger Spanswick mentored me through some of the biggest transitions in my life, educationally and just in growing up. Though my current work is nearly impossible to connect directly to the work I did with Roger, […]
As the fate of the Earth system becomes ever more intertwined with human systems, “thinking in systems” has become more essential than ever. I’ve read books on systems theory (e.g. Allen & Hoekstra 1993), but a refresher is always good, so when I came across Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows (Amazon recommends!), I thought- here’s a great […]
Acting locally: no problem. Thinking globally: big problem! To solve global problems, we need global understanding of local change. Yet no matter how hard we try, it remains extremely difficult to think globally. Even in a world where Earth’s entire surface is scanned daily by satellites and made available online. Even as all of human knowledge and most of humanity […]
Ecologists are studying the least human parts of the most human ecosystems and the most human parts of the wildest ecosystems while favoring the Temperate zone over the Tropics (Nature News Article by Zoë Corbyn: “Ecologists shun the urban jungle”). That’s what we’ve learned since Laura Martin, a graduate student at Cornell’s Department of Natural Resources, came to me with […]
If you still think of rural China as remote, traditional, and unchanged for millennia, think again. China’s ancient village landscapes are among the most dynamic and densely populated on Earth, with a global extent more than twice that all of Earth’s cities combined (2.5 million km2 vs. ~1 million km2). It should therefore come as no surprise that long-term changes […]
With carbon, climate and COP 15 in the news, Google and Microsoft are now battling over carbon mindshare, introducing the latest web-based “Carbonware” designed to help combat carbon emissions and global warming. These add to a growing list that includes the many “carbon footprint calculators” designed to enlighten us on our carbon emissions and the activities we undertake that cause […]
By Jonathan Dandois Will the census of the future ask homeowners how many trees they have on their property? With humanity now faced with a changing climate under even the most stringent efforts to reduce carbon emissions, carbon accounting has become a hot topic for scientists, politicians and economists. While carbon accounting at the scale of individual households and their […]
by Jonathan Dandois The real world is 3-dimensional. And so is real ecology! To improve our ability to observe and measure the ecology of landscapes in 3D, we are exploring a variety of new tools that almost anyone can use. To see some examples, I’ve just updated our <OLD: 3D landscapes page; NEW content on Ecosynth.org page>- do have a look! […]
I ‘m a professor of environmental science at UMBC and have been experimenting with Amazon’s Kindle DX since Friday (June 12, 2009). When the Kindle DX was first announced in May, I was very excited by the possibility of reading journal articles and other materials in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format on an e-reader, and the DX promised to do the […]
Now you can be your own remote sensing platform on the cheap – in 3D! Microsoft’s Photosynth application (installs in your browser) allows anyone to combine pictures taken from any angle from the ground or kite, balloon or radio-controlled airplane- what have you- and make a geometrically-corrected aerial view or 3D virtual world. Just upload your photos! The technology is […]