EnviroAtlas Efforts to Reach Tomorrow's Decision Makers
Citation:
Cochran, F., J. Hartley, A. Neale, J. Daniel, G. Bennett, C. Jensen, AND B. Costelloe-Kuehn. EnviroAtlas Efforts to Reach Tomorrow's Decision Makers. National Council for Science and the Environment, District of Columbia, January 23 - 25, 2018.
Impact/Purpose:
To demonstrate real-life applications of EnviroAtlas in education and environmental management to increase societal resilience and sustainability.
Description:
The movement towards infrastructure resilience can be strengthened by including ecosystem services (ES). The EnviroAtlas, developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and partners, provides a collection of web-based, interactive maps and resources for exploring ES and the integration of natural, built, and social infrastructure. This session will introduce EnviroAtlas from the perspectives of developers and users and will illustrate several examples of educational tools that can inform decision-making for more resilient infrastructure. The first part of the session will describe a K-12 curriculum that was developed to pair the technological tools of EnviroAtlas with the experiential learning model of environmental education. All three modules in the EnviroAtlas educational curriculum contain an outdoor component. The curriculum developer will describe her experience developing activities to engage students and teachers via classroom pilots and teacher workshops, and will share the results of evaluations from teacher workshops. The second part of the session will highlight how EnviroAtlas can be implemented in higher education settings. A professor at Pratt Institute – an art/design/architecture school in Brooklyn, New York – will discuss how he employs EnviroAtlas in an undergraduate ecology and environmental science course. Students use the Eco-Health Relationship browser to explore connections between biodiversity and positive health outcomes, and then use the Interactive Map to search for spatial relationships between measures of biodiversity and ES. A second class session introduces students to the concept of environmental justice by searching for evidence that some demographic groups are disproportionately affected by pollution. These activities provide future designers of the built environment with critical understanding of how spatial tools can lower the impact of future design. We will also hear from the new director of the Eco-Education Program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) about plans to use the EnviroAtlas in Spring 2018 Eco-Ed initiatives. The Eco-Ed research and teaching program creates a cascading effect where faculty and undergraduate students from a wide array of majors and K-12 students learn how to think more ecologically about how natural and social systems intertwine. Students in a Young Researchers program also learn research design skills and collaborate with college students to conduct original inquiries into social-ecological systems. Some of the desired effects of incorporating the EnviroAtlas into teaching and research at RPI will be discussed. The session will further illustrate how EnviroAtlas can be used in professional training and technology transfer opportunities to promote the use of ecosystem markets for resilient infrastructure. Partnering with Forest Trends’ Ecosystem Marketplace, EnviroAtlas data were used to evaluate sites for an agricultural wetlands mitigation bank in Illinois and to assess the compatibility of wetlands compensatory mitigation on lands prioritized for U.S. Forest Service acquisition. Both examples were published in easy-to-understand use cases designed to facilitate technology transfer. The provision of ES should remain at the forefront of infrastructure preservation and new design considerations. To broaden this understanding and educate decision-makers, EnviroAtlas is poised to provide intergenerational learning opportunities.