About this Project
The connections among our socio-economic systems and our ecosystems have become fundamentally cross-scale in both space and time, and our need to understand the connections is urgent. Yet campus-based environmental science education and research remains generally either scale independent or focuses on a narrow range of scales. The Integrative Spatial Modeling Initiative emerges our of several Carleton College faculty development and curriculum projects including, in 2006, both a computational modeling faculty development project and a spatial modeling pilot project conducted as part of a road ecology course. Faculty increasingly recognize that spatial modeling provides an exciting, though largely untapped, integrative framework for teaching about, researching, and responding to complex, multidimensional environmental problems. The project also emerges from student and faculty recognition, most notably in their work involving post-Katrina New Orleans, that interdisciplinary teaching is most successful when it involves students in team-based research addressing complex real-world problems. The Integrative Spatial Modeling Initiative will provide faculty and students with a framework and with interdisciplinary, participatory skills to address these kinds of problems and to propose solutions.
Project PI
Tsegaya Nega (Department of Environmental and Technology Studies-ENTS)