“I study birds and try to understand how they interact with their environment. And people always say, Well, what do you mean by interact? And I always just say, ‘I just want to know how they live,” said Eric Wood, an associate professor in the biological sciences department at California State University, Los Angeles.
“Birds really do tell us about how the health of our environment is, and so we really want to study them, understand how well their populations are doing, so we get a better feeling for how well our environment is doing,” he said.
And this ties in with two major fields that Wood studies, urban and historical ecology. Historical ecology focuses on the interactions between humans and their environment over longer periods of time, such as centuries to millennia. It generally deals with landscape transformations and its consequences, such as the present impacts of historical redlining.
“These were racist investment practices that were done in LA and Salt Lake City all over the country," said Wood. "And so we've been very interested in how nearly, almost 100 years later, how that's affected contemporary avian fauna.”
The related field of urban ecology is the study of how living organisms interact with each other and their surroundings in human settlements, from small communities to megacities.
“As more and more people are moving to cities, we have to think about ways that we can promote living conditions, again, that will support people, that are also going to support biodiversity”
Wood will be speaking about urban and historical ecology, with a focus on how the decisions of our past impact our present… and how our current choices may influence our future, at USU’s Logan Campus on Wednesday September 11th and Thursday September 12th at 4pm.
