Ecosystems Health and Monitoring
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Research at the Earth Institute is organized into nine themes. Ecosystems Health and Monitoring is one of them.
Featured Projects and Centers:
Healthy ecosystems are important to life on Earth. They provide priceless services such as air purification, water filtration and food production, and they support a tremendous diversity of plant and animal species.
Earth Institute research centers and partnerships that deal with ecosystem issues are:
Center for Environmental Research and Conservation
Columbia’s Center for Environmental Research and Conservation (CERC) has a two-part mission: to build environmental leadership and solve complex problems, in order to stem the loss of biological diversity and achieve environmental sustainability. Headquartered at Columbia University, CERC is a consortium of five world-renowned scientific institutions: Columbia University, the American Museum of Natural History, the New York Botanical Garden, Wildlife Conservation Society, and Wildlife Trust.
CERC believes strongly in synthesizing research with education and training and has reached over 10,000 students, conservation scientists, practitioners, policy makers, K-12 teachers and concerned citizens. CERC’s training courses address recent, complex topics, propositions and debates concerning with climate changes, erosion of biodiversity and other environmental and ecological issues that are affecting our modern society. For instance, People in the Landscape is a professional certificate course that focuses on how emerging environmental problems are linked to current processes of economic and political globalization.
Consortium research covers the globe and includes activities such as studying carbon storage by tropical trees and grasslands as well as ways to diversify production and household incomes from biofuels and biodiesel while preserving and maintaining ecological and environmental services in the Amazon basin and other tropical regions.
Two members of the CERC consortium—Columbia University and the Wildlife Conservation Society—have been working to develop models for sustainable environmental development through a project entitled, Translinks. At its core, Translinks seeks to understand the conditions under which ecosystem conservation, governance, and poverty alleviation efforts can be mutually reinforcing, thus greatly enhancing their individual and collective capacities to achieve conservation and development objectives.
CERC participates in The New York Biodiversity Database, an online database of conservation and biodiversity research projects in the New York City region to which each member institution contributes.
Finally, CERC is dedicated to building and enhancing international collaboration by participating in institutional and expert networks operating around the planet. By working in partnerships, CERC brings the best of the scientific and empirical knowledge to deal with current socio-environmental issues.
Black Rock Forest Consortium
The Black Rock Forest Consortium is a unique alliance of colleges and universities, public and independent K-12 schools, and leading scientific and cultural institutions like the Earth Institute, Columbia University, which operates the nearly 4000-acre Black Rock Forest, located 50 miles north of New York City in the Hudson Highlands. Black Rock Forest boasts a well-equipped field station for scientific research, education and conservation, and features dramatic topography, numerous lakes and streams, and high habitat and species diversity. The Consortium emphasizes ecological resource management, “green” and “smart” construction, and environmental monitoring.
Center for Rivers and Estuaries
The Center for River and Estuaries is an association of scientists from Columbia University that study various aspects of water bodies worldwide, including the distribution of sediments, the transport and flux of contaminants, nutrients and other materials, and the evolution and linkage of marshes and wetlands.
Much of the research of the Center for Rivers and Estuaries is performed in the Hudson River, not far from Columbia University, which creates opportunities for outreach activities with communities and students of all ages. The Hudson River Estuary is an ecologically complex ecosystem that is heavily influenced by human activity where the center can study issues of transportation, water and fisheries management.
