Duke Farms Eagle Cam

 

 

Native Plant Society of NJ

What should be here? In New Jersey the Native Plant Society has tried to make some helpful lists of what should be here and what should not. Particularly helpful are the spreadsheets for each county with the species lists that are also coded for plant types, habitat types, and wetlands identification types.

If you don't live in New Jersey, maybe you could try the BONAP's Customized Geographic Database that allows you to build and share your own floristic database for any place in the US. Or, you could just check out some of the lists near you.

Monitoring global forest change

NPR reports on a remote sensing project that uses a novel approach to track changes in global forest cover.The GLAD alerts website and the Global Forest interactive map are both worth checking out.

Soil Judging Competition

 

 

Finding Equal Ground

These might be difficult times in some ways, but this is also a golden age of accessibility to great lectures. Landscape architecture fans should enjoy a talk that LSU is hosting late this afternoon (6ET/5CT) by EDSA Principal, Kona Gray.

Kona A. Gray, FASLA, PLA, EDSA Principal, will give a virtual lecture titled, “Exploration – The Pursuit of Finding Equal Ground” on February 8, 2021 via Zoom.

Kwate Talk on Thursday

 A great chance to see a talk by a Rutgers professor on a notional streaming outlet, hosted by the National Library of Medicine History of Medicine.

Savages cry easily and are afraid of the dark: What It Means to Talk about Race and African American health

	Thursday, February 11, 2021, 2:00:00 PM Time displayed is Eastern Time, Washington DC Local
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	National Library of Medicine History of Medicine This talk examines the impact of racism on African American health, looking at pervasive inequities that drive higher rates of morbidity and death in the United States. Where once explicitly racist theories of African American bodies and minds dominated public and scientific discourse, contemporary understandings of racial inequities in health tend to use less incendiary language, but still conceive of poor health as fundamentally a problem of individuals. Such framing centers health behaviors including diet and visits to the doctor, and leaves the role of social structures uninterrogated. This talk explores the deeply entrenched effects of racism on African American health through institutional policies and practices that defeat socioeconomic opportunity and cause overexposure to harms; stereotypes; day-to-day encounters with racism; and other aspects of American social life. This talk is co-sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Digital Humanities, as part of the recently reaffirmed partnership between NLM and NEH to collaborate on research, education, and career initiatives.
	Naa Oyo A. Kwate, PhD, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of Human Ecology, Rutgers University

A sign of the tides

As flooding becomes more common in some New Jersey coastal towns, flood gauges are getting reset so that more of them work together. Cook alum Joe Martucci reports that the gauges in Ship Bottom, Tuckerton, Absecon, South Dennis, Avalon and Stone Harbor are now calibrated with those in AC and Sandy Hook. Not only does it provide more widely consistent reports, but it also is forward looking:

“The new calculations will take into account the continued effects of sea level rise,” Iovino said.

According to a Rutgers University report released in 2019, sea levels rose an average of 1.5 feet along the New Jersey coast from 1911 to 2019, compared with the global average of 0.6 feet.

Planning Board meetings

Better than TV...

  New Brunswick has a meeting of its Planning Board on Monday February 8.

  Franklin Township has a virtual meeting on February 17.

  Sayreville Planning Board has a meeting on the 17th as well.

The agendas for the meetings include a link to the WebEx or Zoom meeting.

Samoan Circles

 While we are talking about different ways to facilitate public discourse, this description of the Samoan Circle helps show that there are alternatives. This is a specific method, since the Samoan Circle is a leaderless meeting.