In a 2009 article I introduced the concept of a geomorphological niche, defined as the resources available to drive or support a particular geomorphic process (the concept has not caught on). The niche is defined in terms of a landscape evolution space (LES), given by
where H is height above a base level, rho is the density of the geological parent material, g is the gravity constant, and A is surface area. The k’s are factors representing the inputs of solar energy and precipitation, and Pgrepresents the geomorphically significant proportion of biological productivity (see this for the background and justification).
Ecological practices of daily life have taken on new urgency and approaches as consumer citizens increasingly voice awareness of environmental sustainability in China. This lecture will focus on "everyday ecologies"--personal engagement with social and material worlds to negotiate well-being.
Professor Nancy Chen is Chair of the Anthropology Department and an affiliate of East Asian Studies and Feminist Studies at UC/Santa Cruz. Her research interests include Chinese biotechnology, food and medicine, and alternative healing practices. She is author or editor of six books, including China Urban.
Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the UK Confucius Institute.
Some comments from a reviewer on a recent manuscript of mine dealing with responses to disturbance in geomorphology got me to thinking about the concept of disturbance in the environmental sciences. Though the paper is a geomorphology paper (hopefully to be) in a geomorphology journal, the referee insisted that I should be citing some of the “foundational” ecological papers on disturbance. These, according to the referee, turned out to be papers from the 1980s and 1990s that are widely cited in the aquatic ecology and stream restoration literature, but are hardly foundational in general.
Consideration of the role of disturbance goes back to the earliest days of ecology, and is a major theme in the classic papers of, e.g., Warming, Cowles, and Clements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A general reconsideration (“reimagining” is the term many would use, but I’ve grown to hate that overused word) of the role of disturbance in ecological systems was well underway by the 1970s, and the last five years or so have seem some very interesting syntheses of these emerging ideas (two I especially like are Mori, 2011 and Pulsford et al., 2014).
Jeremy Van Cleve joined the Department of Biology in the Spring 2015 semester. As one of the newest additions to UK's faculty, Van Cleve had lots of info to share concering his research, his hopes for his future at UK, and how he's getting along in the city of Lexington.
The College of Arts & Sciences is collaborating on an effort to revitalize science education with the addition of a new science building. Born with ecological ideals in mind, this building will create a learning environment unlike any other on campus as classrooms engage students with the incorporation of nature into the building’s design itself. In this podcast, Philip Crowley, a professor in the Biology Department, describes the new science building from inside and out and discusses what he looks forward to the most.
David Westneat, professor of biology, has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to study how personality and environment affect the parenting behavior of birds.
English professor Erik Reece and Biology professor James Krupa recently released a book that brings to life the history and ecology of one of Kentucky's most important natural landscapes —the Robinson Forest in eastern Kentucky. "The Embattled Wilderness" depicts the fourteen thousand acres of diverse forest region-- a haven of biological richness-- as endangered by the ever-expanding desert created by mountaintop removal mining.
Through a National Science Foundation program called Research Experiences for Undergraduates, 10 students from colleges across the country spent 10 weeks studying suburban ecology and invasive species at or nearby UK's Ecological Research Facility.
