WK 26: Looking at Environmental Change Along a Socio-Environmental Gradient

Friday, August 6, 2021

3:00 PM – 4:30 PM Pacific

Session Organizer(s)

Charles Nilon

University of Missouri
Columbia, MO, USA

Session Co-organizers: George Middendorf, Biology, Howard University, Washington, DC Christine Brodsky, Biology, Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, KS, Gretchen LeBuhn, Biology, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, Amber Budden, NCEAS, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, Bruce Grant, Biology, Widener University, Chester, PA

Ecologists often seek to incorporate information on social, demographic, and economic patterns into their graduate and undergraduate courses.The Crosstown Walks is a teaching module designed to explore how ecological and environmental variables change along socioeconomic and urbanization gradients. Students participating in a crosstown walk collect data on birds, plants, other taxa, and environmental variables along a transect that incorporates a socioeconomic gradient. Students have used a variety of collection techniques beyond personal observation, e.g. data from online resources.
In this workshop we will introduce the Crosstown Walk as a tool can be made available to a global network of students, teachers, and researchers through the development of a new data platform. We will describe the protocol for the walk and for data collection, describe how best practices in data management and data science can be incorporated into the Crosstown Walk module, and discuss approaches for managing data from the walk to make it a truly global Crosstown Walk Project.