Evan H. Joo
Ph.D. Student, Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources, Rutgers University
MS, Sustainability Management, Columbia University
BA, Ecosystems and Human Impact (Geospatial Science Minor), SUNY Stony Brook
As a student with interdisciplinary background, focusing on social and environmental sustainability, I always aim to promote coexistence of human and nature in our urbanizing world. My personal goal is to assess and discover the ecological and social benefits and phenomena that take place in and around urban green spaces, from our backyard to large urban parks, that can help us making better decisions in managing our urban environments.
Research Focus: Assessing socio-ecological linkages in urban green spaces, and urban green space conservation strategies.
Current Projects
-Socio-ecological impact of urban parks and their surrounding environment towards people’s interaction with nature.
We are surrounded by many types of urban green spaces – parks, street trees, playgrounds…etc. However, not all green spaces are created equal. People with various social backgrounds have different levels of access to green spaces, and what those spaces has to offer, ecologically, also varies. My current project is to use the NYC Parks properties in New York City to determine the factors that drives people to parks and have more interactions, combining various social (population dynamics, income level, building density…etc.) and physical features(types of the land, features of the park, area, biodiversity…etc) of the parks and it’s surrounding areas and identify the relationships between each other.
-Campus Forests as a target of Urban Open Space Preservation
There are approximately 3980 degree-granting postsecondary educational institutions in the US. Universities often have open spaces preserved for research, recreation, and other purposes – Harvard Forest (Harvard University), Rutgers Ecological Preserve(Rutgers University), Ashley Schiff Preserve (Stony Brook University) and Binghamton Preserve (Binghamton University) to name a few. Whether the institution is a private or public, they have their own, unique, decision-making systems and bodies that are independent from the municipalities they belong to. My goal is to identify the ecological and social (ecosystem service and educational service) they provide to students and local communities and suggest a new concept of urban green space preservation to educational institution managers, ecologists, planners and more.
50 years “forever wild”: Looking back on the Ashley Schiff Preserve