Understanding Urban Ecology (PDF)

Myrna H. P. Hall (Ed.) is Professor Emerita of Environmental Studies at the State University of New York, College of Environmental Science in Syracuse, NY, where she helped establish the College's Urban Initiative in 2001, was Director of the SUNY ESF Center for the Urban Environment, coordinated the College's Urban Environmental Science Minor, and worked with an interdisciplinary team of faculty members to design an urban ecology course which she taught for 12 years before retiring. As a spatial ecologist, her research and publications have focused on environmental alteration from human activities, including urban/suburban sprawl effects on water quality in the New York City Catskill-Delaware watersheds, ecosystem impacts of glacier loss in Glacier National Park, and the impact of alternative urban green infrastructure implementation on urban energy budgets. She has done extensive land use change modeling inBrazil, Mexico, Bolivia, and Belize to estimate carbon benefits of avoided deforestation. Her interests span urban ecology and architecture, geographic information systems, and land change modeling.
Stephen Balogh earned his doctorate from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF). He currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the US EPA Office of Research and Development in the Atlantic Ecology Division. He is an environmental scientist who studies communities and their connections to the environment across global, regional and local scales - including nutrient issues, ecosystem services, energy and material flows, and restoration. He has collaborated with other scientists, academics, and stakeholders on a broad range of interdisciplinary research. These projects range in scale from regional optimization of nitrogen removal interventions in Cape Cod to neighborhood scale analyses of ecosystem services and material andenergy flows resulting from restoration efforts and population dynamics in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Prior to his current