Michael Agar
Ethknoworks LLC

In February we gave the first paper from the UNM ecology project at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings in San Diego. My favorite part of the day was the poster session for high school kids in the main exhibition hall. There may be hope for the future.

Here's the press release we wrote for our presentation at AAAS's request:

It is an ecological truism that dramatic population change has consequences for a landscape. How does this scenario play out when the population is human and the landscape is urban? The Sevilleta LTER is exploring this question in Albuquerque, New Mexico, using a transdisciplinary approach that mixes ecology, history, political economy, and anthropology. Data of multiple types are gathered from the 1950-1970 time period, defined by the inflection point in the population growth curve for the city. Those data produce a model for growth dynamics based on explaining in-migration of social types who make up the increase and the economic and political change among local politics and developers that change—and eventually resist—the distribution of land use classifications. Concluding comments deal with matters of ecological services, scale of the explanation, and relevance of the project to the integration of ecology and human social research in the LTER community.