Environmental History: Research in Practice Fa22

Robert Sutter is a consultant on large-scale environmental conservation projects with Environmental Conservation Outcomes in Savannah, Georgia.  Prior to that he worked for twenty years for the Nature Conservancy.  He talked with us about three projects he has been involved with:

1. Endangered Species on Maui, Molokai, and Lanai, Hawaii.

Key to this emerging project is data collection.  Over 300 endangered species, more than any other area in the world, requires sophisticated data modeling to optimize conservation action.

2. Clark County, NV, Virgin River Riparian Management Plan

Key to this plan was cooperation.  Particularly important to this project is long-term historical data collection and management.  See this article for more information.

3. Kenai Peninsula Fish Habitat Partnership, Alaska

Key to this plan wis inclusion, in particular getting Native Americans and First Nations (Canada) people involved in the process and working in multiple languages.  The project builds upon the Nature Conservancy's methodology of Conservation Action Planning.

Prof. Catherine Edwards works at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography in Savannah, Georgia.  Her work focuses on the Gulf Stream and physical oceanography, in particular the use of drones to gather data about temperature, salinity, oxygen, chlorophyll, dissolved organic matter, currents, and acoustics.  Her active drones projects can be seen here.

Edwards's research is helping to predict hurricanes as well as map the movements of fish, such as sea bass, gag grouper, and scamp grouper as well as right whales at Gray's Reef and in the Gulf Stream.

Starting in the 1970's, the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography played a crucial role in mapping the Gulf Stream and the old coastline of Georgia at Gray's Reef.  The site for the Institute had been donated by Robert and Dorothy Roebling in 1967 and was initially called the Ocean Science Center of the Atlantic (OSCA).  Governor Jimmy Carter dissolved OSCA and brought the Institute into the University System of Georgia in 1972.

Lorenza Beati curates the United States National Tick Collection in Statesboro, Georgia.  Her personal research work is on the taxonomy of hard tick and sand fly species that are often disease vectors for humans.  Vector-borne diseases like Lyme Disease are one of the areas that the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta works on.

The tick collection began with research by Howard Ricketts and Robert Cooley about Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever in 1906.  It moved to the Rocky Mountain National Laboratories in 1931.  In 1983, the collection, which had expanded over time on a global scale, was moved to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.  From there, it was transferred to Georgia Southern for use as a research collection in 1990.