social science

My interest in understanding the biological, cultural, and historical context of the human experience started at a very young age, and continues to this day. I am an environmental anthropologist, and currently an NC CSC fellow and PhD student in Ecology at Colorado State University. My training has been broad, and has allowed me to work in very different systems. I started down my career path working in Central Asia to understand the late Pleistocene biogeography of humans and Neanderthals during glacial and interglacial periods.

Online surveys are everywhere these days, and with free tools like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms, anyone can conduct a survey. Preparing and conducting a survey for research, however, is no small endeavor and requires careful preparation and consideration. Here are 6 tips for how to get the most out of your efforts.

When I tell people that my undergraduate majors were environmental studies and philosophy, they usually respond with a confused look and a comment like, “Hmm, those are very different topics!” Of course, science and philosophy are fundamentally different in the questions they ask and in how they answer those questions. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t related in critically important ways. To me, the relationship between the environmental sciences and philosophy has always been a natural and necessary one.

Traveling to Suring, Wisconsin for the 3^rd annual Northeast Climate Science Center Fellows Retreat marked the first for my time with the consortium institutions—I was a rookie if you will. As we crossed underneath the YMCA U-Nah-Li-Ya’s entrance arch, the excitement in the air was palpable; we were going back to camp, bunk beds and all.

 The biggest climate change news of 2015 has come from a rather unlikely source: The Vatican of Rome.

The folks who did the renowned "Six Americas" study are back with more interesting data on opinions toward climate change and climate change adaptation. The Yale Project on Climate Change Communication has recently published a paper that breaks down opinions about climate change in the United States down geographically, from the national all the way down to the county level. And since their focus is on communication they have also developed a nice website to graphically present their data.    

This post originally appeared on March 22, 2013 and is part of our throw-back series.

I wrote this post after attending the National Adaptation Forum in Denver, where over 500 academics, advocates and practitioners came together to talk about the state of climate adaptation in the US. One night the screened James Balog’s ‘Chasing Ice’ an inspiring piece of extreme adventure science porn. The film is presents a classic David and Golaiath narrative of a nature photographer with a masters in geomorphology on a quest to photographically document retreating glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere.

While the Australian Government is currently denying the links between bushfires and climate change (sigh…), President Obama has just released an executive order titled “Preparing the United States for the Impacts of Climate Change”.

The third U.S. National Climate Assessment report, released in early May, provides a national synthesis of climate change and its effects that are already being felt across multiple sectors within the U.S., including coastal flooding and extreme heat in the Northeast, shrinking summer sea ice and thawing permafrost in Alaska, drought and associated increases in wildfires in the southwest, decreased water availability in the Southeast, constrained freshwater supplies in Hawai’i, and changes in streamflow timing in the Northwest.